PETER PAN'S DARK SIDE:
The Jack Ketchum Interview
By Quentin Dunne
What’s in a name? Plenty if it’s Jack Ketchum. Once the moniker of a Wild West bandit and referential of Jack Ketch – “hangman” in old English slang - it conjures outlaw violence and grim justice. So perhaps it’s only fitting that today it belongs to a writer of visceral, brutally violent books such as Off Season, Right to Life and, most infamously, The Girl Next Door - all of which employ those themes to devastating effect.
Now, you might think Jack Ketchum is too perfect a name for such a writer… and you might be right. It is, in fact, the pseudonym of Dallas Mayr, a former music critic, lumber salesman and literary agent. His first published fiction was a series of angry, sexually charged stories written under the name Jerzy Livingston (after author Jerzy Kosinski and Mayr’s home town of Livingston, New Jersey). But starting with Off Season – a ferocious tale of cannibals on a feeding spree along the coastline of Maine – Jack took over, and he and Mayr have been together ever since.
Readers of Ketchum’s books are in for a rough ride, no question. But his go-for-the-jugular reputation is only half the story. In the best of Ketchum’s work, it’s the depth of emotion that gives the story its pulse. He has genuine compassion for his characters, and it’s that compassion that can make his work simultaneously riveting and heartbreaking.
Recently, Dallas took time off from his writing schedule to talk with us about influences, storytelling methods, his relationship with fans, and why, in a Ketchum story, anyone who mistreats animals gets exactly what’s coming to them.
PENNY BLOOD: Your work often depicts the extremes of cruelty and savagery that people are capable of inflicting upon one another. Any idea where this fascination comes from?
KETCHUM: Little boys can get pretty nasty sometimes, so maybe I just never grew up. Even Peter Pan's got his dark side. But I remember early-on a fascination with, say, sharp objects. I didn't much care for my chemistry set or erector set, and god knows the football helmet was totally useless. I much preferred my plastic knights and pirates, dueling with sharp swords down to the last man standing, or my dinosaurs -- of which my favorite was almost always Tyrannosaurus Rex, with all those nasty teeth, or Triceratops, who could just put his head down, snort, and then gore the shit out of you. And I often had my knights and soldiers in a kind of Lost World scenario whereby they'd encounter these beasties and all hell would break loose. Where does it all actually come from? Well, I was born the year after Hiroshima and the end of WW2. As a high school kid I read all about the Eichmann trials in a paperback book copped from my dad's store -- it even came with photos of the piles of naked dead. You might want to read the first chapter of The Girl Next Door for clues. I think maybe it was just plain in the air, I breathed it in, and it became part of me.
PENNY BLOOD: Going back to that childhood, do you recall the first books or stories that made an impression on you?
KETCHUM: Peter Pan immediately springs to mind. In later life, and with some justification, people have told me that I am Peter Pan. But Hook and the Croc undoubtedly played in there too, as representations of the dread adult world and the relentless natural one. The earliest books I remember are the Pooh books, the Stuart Little series, Anderson and Grimm's Fairy Tales, and innumerable Golden Books and comics. My dad ran a confectionery store and I got first pick of all the comics -- including the Classic Comics -- so that very early on I remember reading Ivanhoe and Two Years Befor The Mast, Hamlet and Macbeth-- hell, the whole Classics series -- as often as not with the real book sitting beside the comic edition, the one illuminating the other.
PENNY BLOOD: And then you discovered horror. What novels strike you as high-water marks of the genre?
KETCHUM: My first was Frankenstein, which I read as above -- with the comic sitting beside the novel. I remember thinking it wasn't so much scary, though it was, as terribly sad. It's possible that the entire spectrum of possibilities for horror was revealed to me right then and there -- that within the frame of a scary story you could move people in the most unexpected, diverse ways. Then, for me again, my first trans-American flight coincided with my first reading of Dracula. I remember nothing whatever of the flight except shushing my father when he tried to point out the Rockies or whatever and being the only one left with the light on in the whole damn plane, barring, hopefully, the cockpit. Next was Jekyll And Hyde, my first psychological horror, followed, in my teenage years, by guys like Bloch, Bradbury, Sturgeon, Matheson and the other greats from the pulps. Then for years, during college and thereafter, I largely ignored horror in favor of broadening my influences by reading the Russians, the French, the Victorians, early American novels, pretty much everybody Henry Miller ever recommended, the Germans, earlier 20th Century writers like Caine and Hemingway and Faulkner and Chandler and Anderson -- I mean, I read VERY widely. It was only when I discovered King's Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, and The Shining, Peter Straub's Ghost Story and If You Could See Me Now, and a few others that I realized once again how vital the form could be -- and was again all of a sudden. After that, I began devouring as many of the good guys in that area as I could get my hands on. Luckily for me there were a host of them by then, as diverse as T.M. Wright and James Herbert, as Ira Levin and Graham Masterton.
PENNY BLOOD: Sounds like while you were at Emerson College, you took in a lot of world literature. What did you major in there?
KETCHUM: I began at Emerson majoring in Drama. I was also doing a lot of singing at the time. I think I wanted to be Elvis. Sophomore year, unimpressed by the department at the time -- it wasn't much initially -- I switched to English as a major with minors in Drama, Speech and eventually Education. I had some amazing teachers there, most notable among them the Dickens and Victorian scholar Noel Peyrouton and my Oral Interpretation of Literature prof Kenneth Crannell. I worked my ass off for those two guys.
PENNY BLOOD: Aside from the exposure to literature, was there anything from those years you think informed your approach to writing?
KETCHUM: Prior to Emerson, I'd written mostly poetry and short stories. Because it was largely a performing arts school, I'd begun reading a lot of plays, so I wrote my first plays there, one-acts, two of which actually saw production both at the school and off-campus. To answer your question in a larger context, though, by the time I finished at Emerson or shortly thereafter I'd acted on stage and student film, sung, directed, designed lighting and written for the theater as well as poetry and stories -- and even had a short screenplay under my belt based on the first seven chapters of David Copperfield. My belief is that anything and everything you do in the arts feeds into everything else, so all of that experience has in some way or another made its way into whatever skills I have today.
PENNY BLOOD: You were also a teacher for a time, right?
KETCHUM: Yep, two and a half years if you count student teaching -- and I do. I was Boy Wonder of the English Department at Brookline High School. I loved the kids, hated the system. After two years of flying by the seat of my still-hippie jeans at it, I wanted to strangle somebody on an almost daily basis, preferably from the administration or School Board. Decided I'd best get out of there.
PENNY BLOOD: Looking back on those years, do you think there was any indication that writing would, in some fashion, be your career?
KETCHUM: I always wrote, pretty much from the time I first was able to. If you count scenarios played out with plastic soldiers, cowboys, knights and dinosaurs, even before then. It was something I was good at. I was lousy at the things most boys are good at, sports, anything that included strength or dexterity. And then in school I was lousy at math and science and anything that required memorization. But I could always make up a story. Sometimes I think we're defined as much by the things we're bad at as by the things we do well. So just as I'm happy as a clam that somebody eventually invented the calculator, I'm equally happy that I need one. I could be crunching numbers for a living. Who knows?
PENNY BLOOD: Your first book, Off Season, is a tough little read that rattled some cages when it came out. In making this your introduction to the world, were you planning on a career in the horror/suspense field, or was it just the story you felt like telling at the time?
KETCHUM: I wasn't planning a career, but I was casting around. As I said before, I was having a lot of fun with the "new wave" in horror novels that were appearing at the time, as well as the movies, and remember feeling that no one had quite filled that niche between what was permissible in low-budget film, violence-wise, and what was permissible in novels. One of the things I admired about films like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Shivers and the like was their no-holds-barred honesty of approach, mirrored only occasionally in big-budget productions like Bonnie & Clyde and The Wild Bunch. I wanted to see that in a book and thought I could be the one to write it. I doubt I expected that was all I'd ever do as a writer, and as it turns out it wasn't.
PENNY BLOOD: So horror movies, as much as horror novels, influenced Off Season?
KETCHUM: Off Season owes its life in part to Night of the Living Dead and Chainsaw, but I think it's safe to say that good movies, like good books, will always creep into what I write because they creep into what I think about both thematically and structurally. Movies, for instance, taught me to get into a scene as close to the end of the scene as possible and still make the point. My dialogue often uses the same kind of shorthand that dialogue in films does, in that I tend to imply rather than explain and let the action do most of the talking. A long monologue in my stuff is rare, so that hopefully when one does appear, it carries a special, unexpected weight and emphasis. Thematically, well, I like my heroes and heroines as much as any other matinee-goer does and I suspect it shows. I'm always interested in the character who transcends what appear to be his or her limits, even if only briefly. Sometimes I think I'm rewriting Spartacus a lot. Or is it King Kong? Or are they pretty much the same?
PENNY BLOOD: Despite the controversy over its graphic violence, Off Season sold out its initial 400,000 printing. But your second book, Hide and Seek, didn't arrive until nearly four years later. Why the gap?
KETCHUM: I wrote a massive version of my little novel Ladies’ Night in between, that's why. It was contracted-for by Ballantine to be my ‘Salem’s Lot to Off Season's Carrie -- this was way before the shit hit the fan over all the violence in the first book. I wrote it big and wrote it slavishly, adhering to a very long outline and delivered it on time. But by then the reviews were in for Off Season and Ladies’ Night was looking like an embarrassment for the company. They wanted to dump it, and wanted me to return the advance. My agent at the time, Jack Scovil, knows his way around contract law. Basically, he laughed in their faces and said tell you, what? he'll do a somewhat kinder, gentler book for you if you sweeten the Ladies’ Night pot by another ten grand, but he's keeping the initial advance and you owe him the delivery money. They caved -- and that book became Hide and Seek. For a lot more detail on the subject and my twisted state of mind at the time, have a look at my forward to the leaner, meaner version of Ladies’ Night which I finally did publish in '98.
PENNY BLOOD: Many people consider The Girl Next Door your piece-de-resistance. While you were writing it, did you have any idea just how deeply it would get under the skins of its readers?
KETCHUM: Nah. As usual, my goal was to get under my own skin as deeply as possible. Which I definitely did.
PENNY BLOOD: One of the book’s most compelling aspects is the children’s varying treatment of the girl, Meg, how they almost seem to be one-upping each other in a contest of cruelty. None of them seem to have to any reason to hate her, yet the opportunity to have power over another person is too much for them to resist, making the book, to me at least, as much a study of dominance as of cruelty. Was Lord of the Flies an influence in this respect?
KETCHUM: I read Lord of the Flies in high school and you don't read that book early on and not have it influence you -- I just don't think it's possible. And yes, I was aware of that as a kind of ancestor to Girl Next Door, but with the added factor of adult -- and female adult at that -- permission. I think the book's got a lot of issues flitting through its mind -- permission, dominance, conformity, adolescence, jealousy, responsibility, sociopathy, even the war between the sexes and the casualties thereof.
PENNY BLOOD: The book seems to be based on the case of Sylvia Likens [a sixteen-year-old girl who was tortured to death over a 3-month period in 1965, at the instigation of the woman boarding her]. Did she initially inspire the book, or was her ordeal the framework for a story you’d already wanted to tell?
KETCHUM: Gertrude [Baniszewski], her murderess, was the direct inspiration, not Sylvia. I'd been wanting to write about Gert ever since I read about the crime and saw her mug shot in J. Robert Nash's Bloodletters and Badmen. She looked haunted, with a face that just begged you to ask how and why.
PENNY BLOOD: Stephen King was a champion of the book, to the point of writing a lengthy, laudatory introduction for a special edition. Could you tell us a little about how the book came to his attention?
KETCHUM: I had only recently found out that Steve even knew I was alive, when I contacted him with great trepidation at Phil Nutman's urging to possibly blurb Joyride aka Road Kill. "He reads books for breakfast," Phil said, "maybe he's read you." Turned out he'd read everything I'd ever done and from that point on became an instant and deeply generous partisan of mine, has been ever since. Girl Next Door was one of his favorites, and when he learned Overlook Connection Press was doing a limited edition he insisted on writing the intro. Didn't even ask for a fee.
PENNY BLOOD: I understand there is a screenplay based upon The Girl Next Door. Any news on if we’ll be seeing that as a movie? How did such an intense and intimate text translate into the screenplay form?
KETCHUM: I'd rather not go into this. First, it's a longshot and second, I leave movies to the movie people....okay?
PENNY BLOOD: Okay. I’m curious, though, is there a particular book you have that would love to see adapted to the screen, just to see how a filmmaker would approach it?
KETCHUM: There are certainly scenes I'd love to see handled on the screen, if only to see if a filmmaker would be ballsy enough to film it the way I wrote it. I think of the final, ahem, "family confrontation" scene in Ladies’ Night and Carla's upside-down demise in Off Season right off the bat. But I think a lot of my work is pretty cinema-friendly potentially, so hell, I'd be curious to see ANY of my pieces go flickering through the dark.
PENNY BLOOD: Have you ever been approached to write a screenplay, either original or based on one of your books?
KETCHUM: Stuart Gordon [director of Re-Animator] recently optioned and developed a screenplay based on Ladies’ Night, and he subsequently read a draft of one I'd done many years ago. He thought I'd got the characters down more fully and economically in the beginning of the script than he had so he asked if I'd allow him to lift those passages for his own version. So I'm now co-writer on that one. Then, the novella The Passenger began its life as a screenplay. Coincidentally with my turning it into a novella for Night Visions, it was optioned by an indie, QLP Films out in California. They paid me to rewrite the script, which I did, beefing up one of the villains and filling in the holes I'd only just noticed when I wrote the more demanding, reality-wise, prose version. That option languished. But it's currently being looked at very hard by a very good director who has to remain nameless at this time, for the obvious reasons. We'll see.
PENNY BLOOD: For a long time, it wasn’t easy to find your books in the stores, but in the last few years, the publishing folks at Leisure have done a great job getting your recent work out into the world. How did your relationship with them come about?
KETCHUM: I was initially reluctant to deal with them, because years before, when they were just starting out, they'd approached me with the idea of doing Off Season and Hide and Seek back to back and upside down, sorta like the old Ace double-novels. I liked the idea, but at the time they wanted an arm and a leg and were unwilling to pay for said appendages even should we grant them so my agent and I declined. Then Richard Laymon and I were talking about his more recent experiences with Leisure under Don D'Auria's stewardship, which were very positive, and he convinced me that Don was definitely interested in my stuff and that the company had changed and that I should at least listen to him. I'm glad I did.
PENNY BLOOD: One of the Leisure books is The Lost, which I consider one of your finest. What was the inspiration behind this one?
KETCHUM: First, I'd read about this guy Smitty in Nash's Bloodletters and Badmen -- yep, THAT book again -- and knew he was strange enough to write a novel about. I sat on the notion until Christopher Golden sent me a long newspaper clipping about the murder of these two girls in a State Park, one of whom had survived the attack in real life and was talking about it on a lecture circuit. He thought it had the makings of a Ketchum story and I agreed. So I had my opening and once I got the notion to change the period of the actual crimes to the Vietnam era, and to use as characters those kids who neither went to school or off to war, it was off and running.
PENNY BLOOD: One of the most chilling moments in The Lost -- or in any book I can think of, really -- comes when the book’s villain, Ray Pie, cleans the rifle he used in a double-murder four years earlier, and we learn he’s lovingly polished it once each year on the anniversary of the murders. Do such character-defining details tend to come to you “in the moment” as you’re writing, or do you tend to know these details beforehand and just wait to release them on the reader at the right moment?
KETCHUM: Once you've set a character in motion, ideas about him or her hit you from all over the place. You'll be working on chapter three and get an idea for something that should appear on chapter fifteen, so you'll jot it down for later, or you'll be working on chapter fifteen and something will occur to you which you really should have introduced in chapter three, so you go back and put it in and adjust the rest of the manuscript accordingly. Then, many will occur "in the moment" as you say, the absolutely fortuitous notion coming at you at that exact place and time in the character's life on the page. It's delightful when that happens. The overriding factor in all of this, though, is being true to the character you've set free upon the world. In this case, of course Ray polishes the weapons each year on the anniversary of the murders. That's the kinda guy he is. He'd almost have to. Toward the end of a book especially, it's my job mostly just to watch my people and write it down.
PENNY BLOOD: Part of what makes The Lost such so wrenching is we get to really know and care about the characters, and so when those characters meet their fate, it packs a real punch. Do you ever find yourself caring about the characters to the point it’s hard to have them die, and if so, are you tempted to spare those characters even if it doesn’t best serve the story as a whole?
KETCHUM: Not to get too damn strange about the whole thing, but I've never seen the role of writer as one of puppetmaster. For the most part I hate novels where that's the stance the author's clearly chosen. I see my role as first, generative, because it's my mind and my computer that gets things going, and then second, as participatory. I want to participate in my characters' fates, not close every deal for them. It's I who throw up the obstacles in their paths, especially initially, and I who endow them with their strengths, weaknesses and pasts but then once all that's off and running I want to see how they’ll do. I want them to surprise me, delight me or disappoint me as the case may be. So that it would be unfair of me to "pardon" a character and spare him. Unfair to whatever I've set in motion story-wise and even more unfair to whatever degree of truth or realism I've managed to bring to bear on their lives and challenges. There have been people I've loved in life who've failed me, and I've loved them still. There've been people who've fallen by the wayside. Why should my characters be any different?
PENNY BLOOD: But would it be safe to say that, in a Ketchum story, the only one with at least a better-than-average chance of surviving is the cat?
KETCHUM: You noticed that, huh? Yes -- the cat or the dog, or for that matter any animal -- though having felines myself, I tend to write about them most often. Should somebody in my stuff mistreat an animal you can expect a pretty stiff comeuppance, with few exceptions. Would that I could do the same in the real world. No cat, and only one dog, has ever with malice aforethought caused me harm. I forgave the dog, scary as he was. I never forgave his master.
PENNY BLOOD: One of your most recent books, Sleep Disorder, is a collaboration with fellow horror scribe Edward Lee. Could you please tell us a little about the book and how the collaboration came about?
KETCHUM: I did an afterword to the book which pretty much tells you all you need to know about how we collaborate together. Basically, we keep ego to the minimum, respect to the max, and have fun with the material. The collection was Barry Hoffman at Gauntlet's idea. He'd noted we'd done a few stories together over the years, some appearing in pretty marginal places, and thought a book would work, so long as we provided one previously-unpublished story -- which we did -- and he could use the originals of a couple of the stories to compare and contrast to the stories as they finally appeared.
PENNY BLOOD: Stephen King once said that he uses the framework of the horror genre to explore issues of the real world. Would it be fair to say you do the same, delving into the aftermath of Vietnam in Cover, the deterioration of sixties youth culture in The Lost and the abortion wars in Right to Life?
KETCHUM: Sure. In addition to those you mention, Red deals with how we treat animals, legally and morally, in this country. Stranglehold aka Only Child deals with child abuse and the child welfare system. There are a lot of examples. Even my one-and-only vampire story, The Turning, is mostly about how we perceive and treat the homeless. A lot of the time I proceed from things and people that piss me off, so the bully pulpit is often there to some degree. For me, first priority is to write a good story, but following close on the heels of that is to write about what I care about and what moves me. You don't have to do that all the time, god knows -- there's plenty of room for just plain fun -- but in the long run being able to strike a really serious note in fiction and still get the reader to turn that page, is more satisfying. The smile at the end may be bittersweet, but it's longer lasting.
PENNY BLOOD: And when you’re writing those stories for those readers who will be turning those pages, do you try to keep a specific writing schedule?
KETCHUM: When I'm working on a novel, yes, I keep a schedule. I try to do something on the book every day -- even if I'm going to be away for most of that day -- just to keep the continuity firmly in mind. Then on a normal day I'll write for, say, six hours, usually between ten and four in the afternoon, after which -- unless I'm revising, in which case I can go further -- I tend to attain a state not unlike one of Romero's creations. Utterly brain-dead. Instead of the mall, I head for the bar.
PENNY BLOOD: I understand you wrote a memoir, The Dust of the Heavens. Could you tell us a little about that?
KETCHUM: I've written several memoirs over the years, though only Dust of the Heavens and Henry Miller and the Push have thus far been published. Cahill did a limited hardcover chapbook of Dust and Henry Miller and the Push was published as the last piece in Exit At Toledo Blade Boulevard. There are no plans yet to republish them, though little by little I seem to be putting together what may eventually become a nonfiction collection. It probably just needs a bit more heft as yet.
PENNY BLOOD: You’ve been a professional writer for nearly twenty-five years now. Are there still times that you marvel at the fact you’re able to make a living through your imagination?
KETCHUM: Oh absolutely. In fact, since I published my first piece of magazine fiction in 1976 and quit nine-to-fiving that same year, it's been twenty-eight years now of living by my wits -- such as they are. Almost half the number of years I've been alive! That fact's still stunning to me. And when I think of it, I sure do get this grin going.
PENNY BLOOD: Stephen King has consistently championed your writing, letting the world know that Jack Ketchum was something special. Would you like to take the opportunity here to do the same and tell your readers about a writer whose work we should seek out?
KETCHUM: U.S. readers don't know Tim Lebbon's work yet the way they ought to, though that's changing, and Graham Joyce isn't nearly as big in this country as he ought to be. These are amazingly gifted guys with a lot more than scares on their minds -- though they do have very sharp teeth, mind you -- who write with wit and passion and compassion and who, with any justice, will one day be recognized as the major players which, to this writer's sensibility, they already are.
PENNY BLOOD: “Jack Ketchum” is a pseudonym, and prior to adopting that, you also wrote under such pen names as Jerzy Livingston and Bruce Arthur. Any possibility that Dallas Mayr is currently sneaking out some new material under a completely secret pseudonym, one that you’d like to give us in an exclusive scoop and expose right here?
KETCHUM: Nah. Jack seems to be around for the duration, guarding the gates of my output with axe in hand. Though Jerzy does keep creeping in there now and then, probably under cover of darkness....
PENNY BLOOD: After all this time, is it still fun for you to be approached by fans at conventions and to receive letters from those who love your work?
KETCHUM: Oh, I hate being appreciated. What a bore... Are you kidding? The only bigger kicks than meeting the people who've been touched by your work is writing it in the first place and second, seeing it published. I've had readers tell me the most extraordinary things. I remember one guy saying that Off Season was the first novel he ever read that he didn't HAVE to read for high school and that he'd been reading for fun ever since. Another who told me that reading The Girl Next Door helped him deal with and put into perspective his own abuse as a child. It doesn't get any better than that, folks, believe me. And those are just two examples. It's a matter of giving it back, though, isn't it? When you write, that's what you're doing for your readers -- you're giving it back as best you can, your experience of the world, good and bad. And then when a reader feels the need to give you back his or her own experience in reading it, you know you've made a connection that's very special, very gratifying. When I meet my readers I mostly meet smiles. It's easy as hell to smile back.
PENNY BLOOD: Looking back on your career, are there any books that you feel kind of missed their mark or, conversely, that you feel especially proud of?
KETCHUM: All my children are perfect, warts and all. Of course, you have to like warts.
PENNY BLOOD: What can people look forward to from you?
KETCHUM: With a little luck, the unexpected.
For further information on Jack Ketchum’s books, you can visit his official website at www.jackketchum.net.
This interview originally appeared in Issue 1 of Penny Blood Magazine.
