JACK
KETCHUM

		Interview by Monica O'Rourke
SHOULD YOU? TIP JAR "I was never big into religious horror. I don't like religion. So it never got to me. Though The Exorcist was an exception. That book really kicked the shit out of me." - Jack Ketchum

Monica J. O'Rourke interviews
JACK KETCHUM
Page 4

Continued from pg. 3

JK: I want them on my side, but I don't want them pigeonholing me. And they don't seem to need to. At this point I'm doing well enough to satisfy me, and satisfy them, and if they want to put a horror moniker on it, that's fine. I think there's a world of difference between a book like Red and a book like Off Season. I would like to be able to straddle both of those worlds all the time. Triage is coming out soon. We just got a deal with Leisure Books, finally, after all these years. In Triage, with Richard Laymon—who created the idea—and Edward Lee, theirs are both quite serious, scary things. Mine's a black comedy.

MO: Yours is a Stroup story, isn’t it?

JK: It's a Stroup story. It's fun. It's got a horror element to it because Stroup is a kind of violent guy, he's repressed. In a way he's my alter ego.

MO: (Laughs) That's scary to know.

JK: Channeled through Charles Bukowski. My alter ego, channeled through Bukowski. And I have to bless Charles Bukowski because he was the first guy who made me find a voice in men's magazines way back when.

MO: I can't get past this. Scary, that thought. I mean, Stroup is a horrible misogynist.

JK: But he's got a soft spot. You've got to read him better . . .

MO: I don't know. When you're a woman reading this work, all you see is the misogyny.

JK: Have you read Triage?

MO: Yes.

JK: As Stroup grew older, he grew more mellow. Which I guess I have too. (Laughs). But he's hellish. He's awful. He hates gays, he hates women, he hates himself.

MO: But what a guy to pick as an alter ego. That's a little telling.

JK: Sure, it's fine. If you're going to pick an alter ego, why not go alter?

But I'm lucky enough so that people actually pay me now to write poetry every now and then. And it's delightful.

MO: Would you consider The Crossings horror or Western?

JK: It’s three things. Horror, Western, and suspense. If anything I would say it’s probably suspense. Because you want to know if he’s going to get those girls out of there. And the fact that it’s told in that period makes it Western I suppose. And because it’s such a revolting place that these two girls are in, that makes it horror. But essentially it’s suspense, because you want to know, how’s it going to fall out?

MO: What was the first book you truly loved?

JK: The first one I can remember, I just got refreshed about.

Ketchum crosses the living room and pulls a book off the shelf.

JK: It was just republished, and in fact, my agent Alice is the agent for his (author Edward Eager) estate. It’s called Half Magic (Scholastic).

MO: And this was one of the first books you loved?

JK: I remember it very, very well. I was reading at such a young age, I was reading comic books and Weird Tales and stuff. It goes way, way back. But Half Magic stuck in my mind, and when Alice even mentioned the title, I went, “What?” It’s about some kids who find a coin, and they wish something, which kids always do—I mean when you’re a kid, you have to wish for something—and they only get half their wish because the coin is only half magic. I remember being totally charmed by it. And when I opened the book, the illustrations were the same illustrations that were in the original book. I was awed by it, and I remember that night; it was a jolt back to the past.

And I loved Winnie the Pooh, and Stuart Little books. I had a little red Victrola, a kids’ Victrola, and you would get from Golden Books a book and a record. So I remember Peter Pan, I remember—and this is no longer politically correct anymore—but I remember Little Black Sambo, and Peter and the Wolf. All dark in some ways. And this is a little off topic, but the first adult record that I got for that little red Victrola was Ghost Riders in the Sky.

(Ketchum starts singing, "Ghost riders in the sky . . . Yippee kyooo, kyaaaiiii . . .")

JK: My friend and publisher Dave Hinchberger and I went to the Natural History museum one afternoon, and he subsequently found a book by Roy Chapman Andrews, who was once a curator there, called All About Dinosaurs. A kid’s book. Dave had no idea I would know about this, but he bought me a copy of it. I had read that when I was maybe ten years old. Dinosaurs were very big in my early life. I couldn’t believe that anything could go extinct. I never did. And I think that, about dinosaurs, I was probably right.

MO: You weren’t just a voracious reader but were a big fan as a child.

JK: I was a big fan. I was a fantasist. I had a huge fantasy life. So anything that fed into that, whether it was dark or pleasant, whether it was Peter Pan or Captain Hook, I liked it all.

The first book in the horror world that I identified with as a scary, scary book was Dracula. And that was on the first flight that I ever took, with my father, to go to California. It was a long flight, and in those days it was a DC10, or something like that. And I had just bought this book, or I think I stole this book from my father’s store. (laughs) I remember reading the book, and I was the only person awake on that flight, because it was a thirteen hour flight or something ridiculous like that. And I had my little light on and finished the book between New York and California and was scared shitless through the entire thing. I’d never been so scared before, and I’d read some short fiction that was scary, but never a novel that was quite so riveting.

MO: What about a short story? First one that you ever loved?

JK: “The Lake,” by Ray Bradbury. The first story I really, really loved. I’d read a lot of stories and they were all fascinating, but “The Lake,” which was published in Playboy - and how I got my hands on a copy at such an early age I don’t know - was about a young man who goes back with his wife to a lake where he and his young friend had built sandcastles by the lake. She’d drowned in that lake and he hadn’t been back since. He and his friend would make half sandcastles. And this was the first time he’d gone back since he was a young boy, and when he goes back, there’s a half sandcastle there.

MO: That sounds like a beautiful story.

(Ketchum’s cat, George, a beautiful tabby, has perched himself on Ketchum’s shoulder and appears to be trying to eat his ear.)

MO: If you weren't a writer, what else would you be doing for a living?

JK: Doing major drugs. (laughs)

MO: (laughs) That's not a living. Selling major drugs maybe.

JK: No, I never sold. (laughs) I would take the road not taken. I could be teaching, I suppose. I could be acting and probably not making a living at it, in which case I would be a drunk. I couldn't be working for anyone. That much I know. I could probably do anything where I didn't have to work for anyone. Because I can't stand bosses. One of the reasons I do what I do is because I'm my own boss. Bosses, any time I ever had one, infuriated me.

MO: Do you have any unfulfilled dreams or fantasies?

JK: That's two questions. My fantasies I'm going to leave out (laughs).

MO: (laughs) Coward.

JK: (laughs) None of your business. Dreams? I could do a list of "I'd like-tos . . ." I'd like to travel, I'd like to do this, I'd like to do that.

MO: But what about unfulfilled dreams? Something that's not a "like to" but an unfulfilled goal in your life.

JK: I'd like to go on an archeological dig. Or a paleontological dig.

MO: Anywhere in particular?

JK: No. Wherever there are great big bones. Hopefully dinosaur.

JK: I think the book stands up very, very well. I had to reread it a number of times to go through the editing process, and I'm very pleased with it, very proud of it. It's immature in some ways but I like it a lot. And I think it has a lot of impact still. Very much in your face. It's a twenty-four hour period essentially, it doesn’t let go once you start. You will want to turn that page. And I also think the conflict of cultures shows through, the ferocity of cultures shows through. What you've got in Off Season is a very simple morality play. Except it’s a skewed morality. Because here are people who are just trying to survive, but they happen to want to eat you. And you, as a civilized human, have to deal with that somehow. That's something that's not dated. It holds up well.

MO: How does your editor (Leisure Books’ Don D'Auria) feel about this book? Does he have any reservations?

JK: He's happy to do it. He thinks it's going to do well.

MO: And without revealing the ending, which version did you use? The Ballantine version, or the unexpurgated version?

JK: The unexpurgated one, though it’s not the original ending. There were so many edits in the first manuscript that it's gone. It was even more ferocious than it is now. I was trying to go way over the top on that, was trying to go so far over the top that nobody had seen anything like it. Nothing like - as much as I respect them to death - Peter Straub or Stephen King or anybody else had done. In my period of time, there were only a few people out there who were doing really outrageous things. And I found out who they were. They were James Herbert, doing his Rats series, there was Richard Laymon doing his original books The Woods are Dark and The Cellar. Pretty brutal stuff. But that was basically comic book stuff. You could almost laugh it off. Mine was far more realistic and that was its niche. So I was in a niche that was closer in fact to the way Straub and King were writing. Graham Masterton is another one that was way over the top, with The Manitou. In that area, we were pretty much all we had. (laughs) You had The Omen and crap like that.

MO: (laughs) But I liked The Omen.

JK: Hey, I was never big into religious horror. I don’t like religion. So it never got to me. Though The Exorcist was an exception. That book really kicked the shit out of me.

MO: I read The Exorcist when I was ten.

JK: God, you're such a baby . . . and wait - you read that at ten? Shame on you! Where were your mother and father?

MO: They didn't know what I was reading.

JK: Oh my god. But you were ten? God, I had some kid tell me that he'd read Off Season when he was twelve, and I thought that was extreme.

Anyway, I think it's going to hold up really well. It's not dated.

MO: And audience reaction, do you think, will be okay? Are people more desensitized when it comes to today's violence?

JK: They might be. But hopefully this is a good enough narrative, and a riveting enough story, so even if they think, “Oh well, I've seen somebody chomp that nipple before,” they’re going to say, “Excuse me? This is really nasty stuff.”

MO: I think you're right, about the narrative. In fact, in a terrific review of Off Season recently in Publisher's Weekly, they said, “Only a novel of expert articulation and emotional truth can cast such a long shadow, and Ketchum's is both.”

Has your writing been influenced by your own experiences? 

JK: Completely. I bulletin board my own experiences the same way I bulletin board the stuff that I come across in the newspapers (laughs). In a way I do. I can't write unless I know who my characters are, so my characters all have to have some bearing on people I've known. I draw on them constantly, and mask them constantly. Hopefully pretty well (laughs). Don't want lawsuits. And then a lot of them are me, various aspects of me. Is there a writer alive who isn't a Jeckyll and Hyde? The writer's the Jeckyll, the character's the Hyde, whether they’re good Hyde or bad Hyde. So when I'm doing a love scene, I'm Hyde. A nice Hyde this time. I guess we're talking alter ego here. So yeah, they're all me, they're all based on my own stuff. I walk down the street and base stuff on what I see.

I just wrote a scene today for this book that I'm doing now where a woman walks down the street and looks at pigeons. And she think about how beautiful the pigeons are. Well, that's because a couple of days ago, I realized that I really like New York pigeons. I really like them. Most people call them rats with wings. I disagree. I've seen them soar on the high vistas above us, I've seen them flap out from the sidewalks. They’re amazing animals. They can't get kicked, you can't hurt them, they can outsmart you nine times out of ten, even little kids can't catch 'em. They're brilliant animals and they're beautiful.

MO: I've never heard anybody romanticize a pigeon before.

JK: They're beautiful, just beautiful. You can't look at two pigeons and see the same animal twice. They all have beautiful coloring, ranging from amber to black to gray to multi-colored. They're lovely. We don't notice them. We think they're annoying, and that's because we don't look. So if I walk down the street, I look. My job is to look. My job is to look at you walking down the street, see if I can make out your face. And to look at the pigeon.

MO: Describe your work habits.

Continued on pg. 5

Return to Story Time

E.C. McMullen Jr. is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.