There is certainly something to be said about a writer whose first
novel gets blasted as “violent pornography” by the Village Voice. How many writers can boast that? Jack Ketchum can. His debut novel, “Off Season,” appeared in 1981 and promptly garnered the distinction from the famed publication. Now, some twenty books later it is pretty obvious that Ketchum shook off that little incident (and likely secretly gloated over it) and moved on to become one of the great horror writers of his time.

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Born Dallas Mayr in 1946, Jack Ketchum grew up enjoying (and being scared by) Boris Karloff’s The Mummy (he confesses that the “awakening” scene terrified him) and other Universal Pictures releases. Later, the movies that “got to” him included such greats as Night of the Living Dead, Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Last House on the Left, The Brood and Alien. The list goes on, but Ketchum admits that he is still easy to scare. The final scene in the film The Lost really scared him – and he wrote the book on which the movie is based! His favorite authors are an eclectic mix of writers who include Donald Westlake, Clive Barker, John D. MacDonald, Jim Harrison, Robert Stone, Stephen King, Thomas Tessier, Hemingway, Elmore Leonard, Tom Sharpe, Larry McMurtry, Jim Thompson, Ann Rule, Robert Bloch (re-reading,
actually), Maxim Gorky, Charles Bukowski, Philip Roth and Tom Wolfe. A rebel in his own right, Ketchum spent two and a half years as a teacher in a high school English Department. He says that he loved the kids but hated the system. He admits to “wanting to strangle somebody on an almost daily basis, preferably from the administration or School Board.” Lucky for horror fans, he did not stay a teacher, but instead channeled that rebellion and challenge of authority to create a name for himself in the world of horror.

Ketchum says that he always wrote, “pretty much from the time I was first able to write.” He didn’t do well at sports, math or science, but, he says, he could always makeup a story. “Sometimes,” he says, “we are defined as much by the things we’re bad at as by the things we do well.”

It was 1976 when Ketchum published his first piece of magazine fiction. He quite his “nine to fiver” later that year and has not looked back. He has been “living by his wits” for nearly three decades. And it looks as if he is doing pretty well for himself. His short stories Gone and The Box received the Bram Stoker Award for Best Short Fiction, and in 2003 his collection PEACEABLE KINGDOM and novella CLOSING TIME won for best collection and best long fiction respectively.

In addition to writing under the pseudonym, Jack Ketchum, he has also sported such pen names as Jerzy Livingston and Bruce Arthur, but it doesn’t look as if he will be writing under the name of Dallas Mayr anytime soon – or more like never.

Ketchum’s advice and views on writing are surprisingly practical. When he is working on a novel he keeps a schedule. He tries to do something on the book every day, shooting for six or so hours a day, usually between 10 am and 4 pm. Ketchum says, “Writing is high-level play. You get to live in a world entirely of your own imagining for a while just like when you were a little kid. Who, except schizophrenics maybe, wouldn’t enjoy that?”