Series Site
"Born Dallas Mayr in Livingston, New Jersey, Jack Ketchum arrived on the horror scene with his debut novel Off Season in 1981. Off Season, an updating of the Sawney Beane story, drew the outrage of the Village Voice, which publicly scolded the novel’s publisher for printing violent pornography. Over the next 37 years, until his death in 2018, he would write over 20 novels and novellas, five of which have been adapted for the silver screen. A protégé of horror writer Robert Bloch, Ketchum’s novels eschewed the supernatural for unflinching and unsettling studies of man’s capacity for evil, often drawing on true crime for inspiration. While never failing to deliver the genre goods, weaving provocative scenarios pushing the boundaries of the macabre and twisted tales of sex, murder and torture for hardened extreme horror gore-hounds, Ketchum’s writing distinguishes itself from that of his Splatterpunk contemporaries for its sobriety, restraint and empathy which lend a tragic and mournful tone to the carnage." -Spectacle