Jack Ketchum (1946–2018)
Author of The Girl Next Door
About the Author
Image credit: Georges Seguin
Series
Works by Jack Ketchum
The Passenger 9 copies
Gone 3 copies
Sheep Meadow Story 3 copies
Przeprawa 2 copies
Horror 101: The Way Forward 2 copies
Returns 1 copy
Extras 1 copy
The Holding Cell 1 copy
Amok Jagd 1 copy
Übler Abschaum 1 copy
Seascape 1 copy
Cold House 1 copy
Dust of the Heavens 1 copy
Meine besten Erzählungen 1 copy
The Haunt 1 copy
Ich bin nicht Sam 1 copy
Sie erwacht 1 copy
Associated Works
Psychos: Serial Killers, Depraved Madmen, and the Criminally Insane (2012) — Contributor — 85 copies
In the Shadow of the Towers: Speculative Fiction in a Post-9/11 World (2015) — Contributor — 37 copies
Mister October: An Anthology in Memory of Rick Hautala (Volumes 1 and 2) (2013) — Contributor — 17 copies
Butcher Knives and Body Counts: Essays on the Formula, Frights, and Fun of the Slasher Film (2011) — Contributor — 14 copies
A Haunting of Horrors, Volume 2: A Twenty-Book eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult (2014) — Contributor — 8 copies
Piercing the Darkness: A Charity Horror Anthology for the Children's Literacy Initiative (2014) — Contributor — 7 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Ketchum, Jack
- Legal name
- Mayr, Dallas
- Other names
- Livingston, Jerzy
- Birthdate
- 1946
- Date of death
- 2018-01-24
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Livingston, New Jersey, USA
- Place of death
- New York City, New York, USA
- Occupations
- actor
Teacher
literary agent
Author - Awards and honors
- Bram Stocker Award (Short Story ∙ 1994)
Bram Stocker Award (Short Story ∙ 2000)
World Horror Convention Grand Master Award (2011) - Short biography
- Jack Ketchum is the pseudonym for a former actor, teacher, literary agent, lumber salesman, and soda jerk. He is also a former flower child and baby boomer who figures that in 1956 Elvis, dinosaurs and horror probably saved his life. His first novel, OFF SEASON, an updating of the Sawney Beane story, prompted the Village Voice to publicly scold its publisher in print for publishing violent pornography. He has always wondered what they would think of THE GIRL NEXT DOOR. His short story THE BOX won a 1994 Bram Stoker Award from HWA.
Members
Reviews
This book was pretty good. It is slow moving if you are expecting action and the creepies, but perfectly paced if you want to care about what happens.
This book was disturbing and unsettling. Very well written. Sad though.
This was my introduction to Jack Ketchum. Although it is definitely not for the faint of heart or for the squeamish, it is brilliantly written and immediately placed him in my list of favorite authors. He will be missed.
Lists
Overdue Podcast (1)
Awards
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Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 96
- Also by
- 55
- Members
- 5,918
- Popularity
- #4,173
- Rating
- 3.8
- Reviews
- 259
- ISBNs
- 215
- Languages
- 10
- Favorited
- 34
We are in the small town of Farmdale, New Jersey, during a long hot summer holiday in the late 1950s, and living next door to the twelve-year-old narrator, David, is Ruth Chandler and her three children. There are also two other girls now living there, cousins whose parents were killed in a car crash. Ruth hates these two, particularly the older one, Megan, who is everything she no longer is—young, pretty, nice, full of life—and what begins as insults and petty humiliations gradually escalates into physical abuse.
But it doesn’t stop there. Beneath the house Ruth’s husband, when he was still around that is, had built a nuclear shelter: a windowless concrete box, sealed by the heavy steel door from a meat-packing plant (this was the 1950s, a lot of people built them). Over the course of weeks in that basement, first under Ruth’s guidance and then passive acquiescence, the cruelties become outright tortures as her own children increasingly take over; then word gets around among the local teenagers and they start turning up to watch or join in. The victim, Megan, is fourteen years old, most of her tormentors about the same age or younger. It goes on all day, day after day, for weeks on end while summer passes.
For me, what’s most appalling here is not that it is children who are doing most of these things, nor even the physical acts themselves, but the numbers doing it. If a single human being did all this to another, that would be terrible; but here you have four, eight, twelve of them at once with their cans of Coke or beer, all crowded around a single, naked, badly-injured girl: gagged, blindfolded, her hands bound and suspended by ropes from the ceiling beams. A dozen doing all this to one—it’s that.
Although horror fiction, this is based on what really happened to sixteen-year-old Sylvia Likens who was tortured and starved to death over months by Gertrude Baniszewski, her children and the neighbourhood teenagers—a case which shocked America. That was Indiana and 1965, but similar to this novel otherwise with the process escalating from taunts and minor cruelties to such tortures as immersing Sylvia in a bath of near-boiling water while repeatedly banging her head against the tub to bring her back round each time she fainted. There, too, the mother, and perhaps also her eldest daughter Paula, seem to have been at least partly driven by jealousy of Sylvia’s youth and prettiness. But the rest of them were driven by nothing—they simply enjoyed doing it, and remained mostly unrepentant afterwards.
The Girl Next Door does differ in some ways from these real events. For one thing, here there’s a narrator, more ambivalent about what’s happening than the others and who only watches but never joins in. In the real world there was no one at all to help Sylvia Likens; a number of people in the neighbourhood suspected what might be going on, but not one of them said a word or did a thing. Also, I found the second half of the novel less convincing than the first, less realistic (due to the presence of that narrator I think). All the same it’s a ghastly, an unputdownable, read. In both fiction and real life these were not “monsters” who did this, but ordinary human beings. They were anybody, and that maybe is the real horror.… (more)