Cover
Jack Ketchum (Dallas Mayr)
Leisure, 2009 (1987)
ISBN: 0-8439-6187-2
Few authors affect me the way Jack Ketchum does. On the surface it's easy to see how and why. His lean and clean prose style and believable characters sink into my brain and feels REAL. With capital letters. He’s a different kind of horror writer. He leans into strong stuff. Strong emotions, strong violence and strong outcomes. He rarely tackles the supernatural, figuring I assume that there's quite enough evil lurking the hearts of men here now. And of course, he’s right.
Ketchum famously wrote Off-Season right off the bat, that was in the early 80s as the “splatter punk” movement was forming and gaining its minor foothold. It’s a simple book of cannibalistic horror that pits city folk against the cannibals that live up in the woods by the cabin that they rented. Sounds like any number of low-budget films. Pretty young people destroyed by “the other” in a cabin in the woods. It could be totally disposable lurid entertainment, right? Well Ketchum takes the King approach and spends a good chunk of the beginning of the book with the cast of characters, making you care a little as he’s slowly ratcheting up the tension. After that all hell breaks loose in the strongest (that word again) way possible. It’s not for the faint of heart or the weak of stomach. This started the Dead River trilogy with Ketchum returning to the family of cannibals, proving that it’s hard to kill a cannibal. Or a good story about cannibals. The final book, The Woman is a co-author job with the director Lucky McGee who made a movie about it. The whole trilogy is an exercise in grueling horror. So, ya know, the good stuff.
Cover has a simple story, it’s about a Vietnam veteran named Lee who sorta lives in the woods with his wife and kid and grows weed to live. Oh, and he has a tenuous grasp on reality sometimes. But luckily he has a nice dog. When a group of unwelcome city people come for a visit, that tenuous grasp is gone. Lee believes it's the Viet-Cong and he’s back in the war. Suddenly there’s booby-traps and death. The rest is a thrilling hunter/the hunted story told by an expert in suspense, shock and horror. Now, you get why I mentioned Off-Season, huh?
Again, it’s not the most fresh and original idea, sort of First Blood meets The Hills Have Eyes. But what makes the book is Ketchum’s rock solid writing. Sometimes it’s not the plot, it's the characters. Well, a lot of the time it's not the plot, it’s the characters. Ketchum spends a lot of time with Lee, we grow to understand who he is and what his fractured mind is doing to him. You can’t really blame him as he’s committing the horrible acts, but it doesn’t mean it's right or you’d want to hang out with him.
Ketchum is an interesting writer (and would have been a great Willem Dafoe impersonator), a fringe “name author” who garnered cult status but never really had the break-out hit that launched him to King levels (or *shutter* Koontz levels) and made him a household name. Of course he would have had to tone-it down a bit for that to work. But Cover here comes from early in his career and it sorta feels like that might be what he was trying to do. Merge his stuff with something that might be sold by the thousands at airports. It has his familiar wooded terror angle from Off-Season and the wounded Vietnam veteran trope that was extremely popular at the time. It's an often forgotten Ketchum, coming a little before his probably best known work The Girl Next Door but its still a masterclass is suspense and terror.
Roy Nugen is an award-winning writer, producer, property master, plus actor. He comes from a family of musicians, engineers, wildcatters, cops, lion tamers, and carpet salesmen. Evil Dead II changed his life and he once partied with Lloyd Kaufman.
He has written 15 short films including Bag Full of Trouble, Potboiler, Handle With Care, Death in Lavender, Hole in the Ground, and the feature film Arrive Alive, many of which have played across the country. He has been the property master on 17 short films and 2 feature films.
Roy is also a prolific book reviewer and collector of vintage pulp paperback books. You can read his reviews on his blog Bloody, Spicy Books and multiple magazines including Paperback Fanatic, Hot Lead and Sleazy Reader. He has also written afterwards for novels and for various websites. He lives in the only city that once arrested L. Ron Hubbard with his wife and cats.