I'd say that Jack Ketchum has slowly been growing on me, except that I've liked his writing ever since I first began reading Off Season, his 1980 novel about cannibals attacking vacationers off the beach. The thing about Ketchum is, his stuff is so violent, so visceral, and downright tragic that his books are somewhat exhausting. I read the sequel to Off Season, the better, equally violent Offspring, and from there moved on to The Girl Next Door (1989), a novel that probably deserves its own article.The Girl Next Door is one of the most deeply disturbing books I've yet read, and one of the best. The horror is derived from human cruelty, nothing supernatural, the same as his cannibal stories, and when I'd finished I put the book down knowing I'd read something brilliant, but at the same time, I was wholly ready to move on to another book, something lighter to follow it up.
Now, having read The Lost, I think I can safely say I'm hooked and won't be allowing as much time to pass before reading another Ketchum novel.
The Lost tells the story of young adults in the late sixties, hangin' out, partying, trying to get laid--and keeping the awful secret that one of them, their leader, murdered two girls, very randomly, four years before. His name is Ray Pye, a self-obsessed, vain monster of a man, who stuffs his shoes with beer cans in order to rise above his natural five-foot-three, and demands loyalty from the younger kids who buy drugs from him and hang out at his place, and more or less worship at his feet.
Ray's two best friends, Tim and Jennifer, are the only ones who know about the murders. Two cops, one retired, are pretty certain, however, and when the second girl succumbs to her injuries four years later, the cops begin to harrass Ray and his friends, to try and break him down, get him to slip up, so they can finally nail him.
The Lost doesn't contain nearly as much graphic violence as the books I've mentioned above, but when it happens, it's very, very rough. The murders in the prologue are described in explicit detail, leaving the reader to wonder what else could possibly occur in the next 350 pages.
There is a lot of waiting, a lot of tension that builds and builds, an inevitability that at some point, something is going to push Ray over the edge, once again, probably worse than the time before. Ketchum captures the mood of the late sixties, finds parallels with his story and the Manson murders, committed around the same time, and writes believable characters the reader can't help but care and worry about.
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