His protagonist proceeds to speak of the notoriety she gained from her first novel, and of her betrayal by her own publisher, who got “so upset he damn near fired the editor. What you don’t get I hope is simple, comfortable beach-reading. You get themes in my books, you get people, issues–though I try hard not to hammer you over the head with them. I’m no Dostoevsky but I’m no hack either. I work hard and carefully at what I do and I think I do it fairly well. The woman also shares an interesting piece of aesthetic self-assessment: Some of it can be pretty brutal.” Another factor is her refusal to follow publishing trends and produce “a big fat blockbuster” (“damned if I’m going to write something just for the money or so some editor can be flavor of the month with the boys on publishers’ row”). I tend to proceed from the dark side, to try to disturb you. This is partly because of what she writes: “Suspense, horror. She speaks of enjoying a “cult following” but never experiencing break-out success. The writer in the story clearly is a female stand-in for Ketchum. Beyond such plot twists, though, what distinguishes “The Work” is the window it provides onto Ketchum himself. A seemingly simple situation–until the eventual revelation that Carey is a contract killer, and the woman a disgruntled writer determined to have him murder not her publisher or editor but her. Set in a remote home in the Maine woods, this 1997 story (collected in Peaceable Kingdom) opens with a business meeting between an anonymous female protagonist and the man, Richard Carey, she has flown in on retainer.

Here today I have gathered the posts for numbers 10-6 on the countdown.

pieces employing the Jerzy Livingston pseudonym were excluded, as were any co-authorings with Edward Lee. The ranking was based on works of short fiction (short stories and novelettes) with the Jack Ketchum byline–i.e. In honor of the recent passing of Jack Ketchum, I would like to import this countdown (presented in a series of posts back in 2012) from my old Macabre Republic blog.

Jack ketchum dead river series