Jack Ketchum is the literary equivalent of a chainsaw. He's loud, powerful and, in the horror genre, is known for shredding a whole lot of human flesh.
One of the pioneer writers of the early '80s "splatterpunk" movement (a wave of literary horror with a focus on extremities), Ketchum (the pen name of Dallas Mayr) has written consistently for more than two decades.
"The Lost" is his latest work and, unlike his hard-to-find limited edition and/or short print run books of the past, it's available at almost any major bookseller.
It is a much tamer beast than his older classics, but a wholesome thriller for the whole family it ain't.
Set in the '60s, "The Lost" revolves around a group of teens who share a terrible secret. Ray has a twisted streak a mile wide; while on a camping trip with Tim and Jennifer, a prank gets out of control and he sadistically shoots two women.
The three stay together as friends but their ties become increasingly strained over the years as Ray seems to be a ticking time bomb waiting to go off again. Ray's propensity toward hateful womanizing and the local police breathing down his neck don't help matters, either.
Since this is a Jack Ketchum book, it's not spoiling anything to say that terrible things happen to everyone and it doesn't end well.
Ketchum's prose is as razor-sharp as it always is, with psychological menace and the potential for violence lurking right from page one.
He has a unique literary device that he intersperses into sections that involve the worst violence. Instead of making victims of shooting sprees cardboard cutouts, he takes a good deal of space - sometimes even a few pages - to go into the details of their lives and flesh them out fully as characters. As a result, readers get their noses rubbed in the humanity of the victims - rather than just writing them off.
There are some minor prose differences between "The Lost" and Ketchum's past work: He no longer devotes paragraph after paragraph to descriptions of bodily mutilation (one paragraph generally suffices here) and he goes out of his way to avoid capitalizing "God" anymore.
Perhaps this means the writer's worldview has taken a turn for the worse. There was a moral quality imbued in even his darkest work in the past that is extremely difficult to locate here. A lot of it seems nihilistic for nihilism's sake.
Ray's hateful, paranoid worldview is pervasive and Jennifer and Tim, who spend a great deal of their time getting drunk and stoned, seem doomed from the start, whether they survive or not.
Ketchum's descriptions of setting are brisk but the details of the culture and surroundings adequately serve to immerse the reader in the '60s setting.
All the books the characters read are important to the time period and reflect what is happening there.
Worldwide events such as Vietnam also color the environment the people live in and demonstrate what a powerfully transitive time period the '60s was.
Ketchum's contention, made clear through a monologue by an old sheriff, is that the world was pretty idyllic just a decade or before the narrative takes place. Ketchum uses a great deal of metaphor to say that the world was and is changing, but not for the better.
Nothing Ketchum writes will probably ever match the viciousness of his 1980 debut, "Off Season," but he more than makes up for this by growing as a writer and becoming more focused on the humanity and complexity of his characters.
If "Off Season" had been written with the prose style used in "The Lost," it would have been unbearably emotional in addition to unbearably violent.
Still, the book drags in sections. One of the strengths of his past work is its brevity. Ketchum can cram a whole lot of rough action and terror into the 200 pages that was the average length of his thrillers.
"The Lost" is 394 pages, nearly double that. It can't be read in one sitting and requires some prolonged attention. The demands it makes on the reader are ultimately unfair since it offers the reader less than usual at its conclusion.
The length issue isn't automatically a strike against the writer. After all, longtime Ketchum fan Stephen King's best book is also his longest, "The Stand." But it becomes clear that Ketchum is stretching everything a bit thin and delaying the inevitable conclusion around the book's midpoint.
Fans of intense thrillers as well as Ketchum followers will get a rough kick out of "The Lost," but casual readers would be better off introducing themselves to the writer with one of his shorter, simpler works, such as "Joyride."
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