The most horrifying thing about Jack Ketchum's The Girl Next Door is that it is based on a true incident - horrendous abuse, torture and eventual murder of the 16 year old Sylvia Likens in 1965. Sylvia's parents, carnival workers who moved often, left her and her sister in Indianapolis under care...
This landmark collection gathers more than thirty of Jack Ketchum's most thrilling stories. "Gone" and "The Box" were honored with the prestigious Bram Stoker Award. Whether you are already familiar with Ketchum's unique brand of suspense or are experiencing it for the first time, here is a book ...
I’m going to be honest in the reasoning in my reasons for buying Jack Ketchum’s Joyride. My cheapness in pages per dollar came into my decision not to buy the very short novella, Weed Species. Looking at the cover and seeing these epically evil plants (and I love my plant based horror, apart from...
In 1965, teenage friends Ray, Tim, and Jennifer liked hanging out in the campgrounds, but Tim and Jennifer didn't know what Ray had in mind for those two girls in the neighboring campground. Four years after Ray murdered the two girls, he's never been charged. Tim and Jennifer thought the worst w...
Jack Ketchum's "Stranglehold" might scare the hell out of you if you're a divorced mom with elementary school-aged kids, so be forewarned. Lydia Danse was a victim of sexual sadism at the hands of her husband, Arthur. While the violent sodomy ends, his emotional abuse continues. One night, after...
He'd never given chase to a squad car before. He'd never expected to. It was a new experience. But tonight was a night of a lot of firsts. He'd never shot a kid for instance. But the little girls were as bad as their mamas, he'd found that out the h...
said to me that to her way of thinking the real goal of life was simple—it was life, more and more of it, moments to days to years down a long winding path through eternity. That the ultimate goal, obviously, was to live forever. She believed that someday we’d master that trick too and was mildly...
“It’s no good,” Manetti said. “It’s gotten too damn dark. Somebody’s just going to wind up busting his skull on these rocks here.” He was right, thought Peters. The search was hampered by high tide now, the beach shrunk to a narrow strip of sand, f...
My body is telling me something frightening and my body doesn’t lie. As soon as I’m awake I can feel the wetness inside me -- Patrick last night -- so I roll away from him still asleep beside me, and as I stand his semen starts to ooze and slide along the inside of my left thigh. It’s just barel...
I was drunk and barely twenty-one and Hart was playing cards with two other men in the Little Fanny Saloon. I'd seen him in there nearly every night but we'd never spoken a word to one another.Were it not for the gold at Sutter's Mill that January neither the Little Fanny nor the town for that ma...
It's chilly." I looked at her breasts. The nipples were tightly puckered. "I can see that. I suppose you'll want your clothes back too." "Please?" "Why not." I handed them over. All except the panties. "These I'm keeping I watched her dress. In the moonlight it was an extremely pretty bod...
She’d fallen asleep the night before at her desk in the study and awakened from a dream of Micah Harpe, all three-hundred-plus pounds of him, crashing through the picture window and spraying her with shards of glass, slamming up against her desk and scattering papers and cigarette butts everywher...