Blood-curdling Tales

A few nights ago, I finished reading Jack Ketchum's Off Season. Up until about a week ago Ketchum was unheard of before I happened upon his name advertised on one of those spinal-cracker paper inserts in my copy of Richard Laymon's The Cellar. Initially, when I saw his name marketed alongside Richard Laymon and two other unknown Horror novelists for an avid Horror reader book club, I expected to read straight-out pulp. Perhaps Ketchum's updated dedication to his two greatest mentors--Robert Bloch and Stephen King--was the first hint of his Minor cult status. Unlike Bloch or King, Ketchum's Off Season tears at its reader limb-by-limb in a frenzy of edgy, visceral gore - specifically, cannibalism - like Maenads in a 20th Century Bacchae. While a reader experiences the intimate psychic world of psychoses in Surround Sound in Bloch's or King's stories, in Ketchum's novel, the reader is wracked on a visceral level by a terrorizing, slasher style of natural human gore minus the violin, that splatters blood across the lens of the reader.

I'll have to read something else by Ketchum - next I'm reading Stephen King's Insomnia.