Peaceable Kingdom (mobi)
Read Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) Online
Authors: Jack Ketchum
“Ketchum has become a kind of hero to those of us who write tales of terror and suspense. He is, quite simply, one of the best in the business.”
—
Stephen King
“Ketchum writes with economy and power, in sentences that tighten like noose wire.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“Ketchum [is] one of America’s best and most consistent writers of contemporary horror fiction.”
—Bentley Little
“Just when you think the worst has already happened . . . Jack Ketchum goes yet another shock further.”
—
Fangoria
“Ketchum’s prose is tight and spare, without a single misplaced word.”
—Cinescape.com
“For two decades now, Jack Ketchum has been one of our best, brightest, and most reliable.”
—
Hellnotes
“A major voice in contemporary suspense.”
—Ed Gorman
“Jack Ketchum is a master of suspense and horror of the human variety.”
—
Midwest Book Review
“Jack Ketchum has been hailed as a writer whose unflinching gaze at man’s darkness is disturbingly thought-provoking. Consistently, he’s displayed a knack for taking readers to uncomfortable places, daring them to stare harsh reality in the eye.”
—
Shroud Magazine
Other books by Jack Ketchum:
JOYRIDE
COVER
OLD FLAMES
TRIAGE
(anthology)
OFFSPRING
OFF SEASON
THE GIRL NEXT DOOR
SHE WAKES
RED
THE LOST
J
ACK
K
ETCHUM
EACEABLE
K
INGDOM
DORCHESTER PUBLISHING
January 2011
Published by
Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
200 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Copyright © 2003 by Dallas Mayr
For individual story copyrights, see
page 416
.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ISBN 13: 978-1-4285-1236-8
E-ISBN: 978-1-4285-1231-3
The “DP” logo is the property of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
Visit us online at
www.dorchesterpub.com
.
The Great San Diego Sleazy Bimbo Massacre
The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard
Lines: or Like Franco, Elvis Is Still Dead
I don’t know why you put up with me.
It’s a matter of consistency. Or in my case, inconsistency.
As a writer I’m all over the place.
Take the books. Suppose you came to my stuff through
Off Season
way back when and you kinda liked its violent streak and its extreme stance so you’re looking for more of the same. You have to wait a while—four whole years—and then when you finally do find a new Ketchum title on the racks what do you get?
Hide and Seek
. A quiet little first-person suspense story, a
love
story no less with, yeah, some nasty low-ball curves thrown at you at the end but compared to the first book, practically good-natured.
Or here’s another scenario. Suppose the first book of mine you read is
Hide and Seek
, and you miss
Cover
completely—hell, almost everybody did—and the next thing you find is
The Girl Next Door
. Now I’m going to do a
lot
of supposing here and assume that you ignore the ditsy skullheaded cheerleader on the cover, you assume it’s
not
Ketchum doing an R.L. Stine ripoff and actually buy the
thing and sit down to read it and at first it’s another quiet little first-person memoir-type novel so you’re comfortable with that from having read
Hide and Seek
, so you get a little into it and then a little more into it and finally you say . . .
. . . what the hell
is
this shit! Has he gone totally out of his fucking
mind?
Then maybe your first Ketchum book’s
She Wakes
. Ancient Greek Gods and Goddesses, zombies and cats and snakes all chasing one another all over the Aegean. Then you pick up
Red
.
Hmmm. That’s interesting
.
This one seems to be about an old guy and his dog
.
Has he gone totally out of his
mind?
You get the point.
Still, should you need any further proof of my inconsistency, that’s what this volume is about—to rid you of any notion other than that once and for all. And I welcome it wholeheartedly. The short-fiction form is where a writer gets to move around most anyway. Unlike a novel you don’t have to live with an idea or a set of ideas for six months or a year, so as long as you obey whatever idea you do have you can zig and zag to your heart’s delight. Experiment. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Get in, get out, go on to something else.
So there’s stuff in here like “To Suit the Crime” that’s as ice-cold heartless as anything I’ve ever done and stuff like “Firedance” which is almost cuddly. Surreal stories like “The Holding Cell” and “Chain Letter” and the odd black comedy like “The Haunt” or “The Business.” You even get my one and only vampire story in “The Turning” and an honest-to-God UFO yarn in “Amid the Walking Wounded.”
There’s even a Western.
As I say, I’m all over the place. And I think that I’ve been very fortunate in that most of my readers seem to expect that of me by now and apparently have no real urge to pin me down. Peter Straub once paid me the compliment of
saying that he thought a lot of people came to my writing for the wrong reasons but stuck with me for the right ones. I suspect there’s some truth in that.
But there’s also the fact that in my experience most of my readers are first and foremost plain old-fashioned
readers. Good
readers. They’re not looking for cozy brand-name output and that means I don’t have to give it to ’em. They’re not lazy and have little patience with pre-fab beach-bag books or Oprah’s opine du jour. They’re questers.
They know that every now and then you’re gonna get lucky and pure gold like King and Straub’s
Black House
will simply drop into your lap at the local supermarket but after that, if your bent is horror and suspense fiction, you’re gonna have to get your hands dirty and root around for more. Find a Ramsey Campbell or an Edward Lee. They
expect
diversity and search it out. They want what all good readers want—to be taken somewhere in a book or a story that’s really worth visiting for a while. Maybe even worth thinking about after.
If that place happens to scare the hell out of you all the better.
Some of the stories collected here try to do exactly that and some don’t. Sure, they all tend to proceed from some dark place—it’s me after all—but sometimes they’ve got something else on their mind too. And that’s one of the reasons this book is called
Peaceable Kingdom
.
I wasn’t just being ironic, honest.
The title comes from the final story in the book, “Firedance.”
Yep, the
almost cuddly
one. Keep in mind that I said almost.
For those of you who might be a little rusty on your Old Testament or art history the phrase derives from a passage in Isaiah 11:6–9, which a number of nineteenth-century
naif
painters favored, often rendering the scene beautifully and using
Peaceable Kingdom
as the title for their works. I
reference the paintings in my story. But here’s an excerpt from the biblical passage:
The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them . . . and they shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain
. . .
Wolf and lamb. Leopard and goat-kid. Calf and lion, little piggy and little child.
Diversity, union, harmony. Hopes I have for this collection.
With the predators among them all defanged for good.
And that, finally, is my wish for us all, concealed or obvious somewhere in each of these stories—
they shall not hurt or destroy
.
Not on my damn mountain.
Jack Ketchum
December, 2001
She found the rifle standing on its stock in the back of his cluttered closet.
Unexpected as a snake in there.
Not that he’d made very much attempt to hide it.
It was leaning in the corner behind the twenty-pound fiberglass bow and the quiver of target arrows his father had bought him for Christmas—over her objections. His winter jacket hung in front of it. She’d moved the jacket aside. And there it was.
He’d complained in the past about her going in his closet and for a long time she’d obliged him. Privacy, she knew, was important to a ten-year-old—it was especially important to Danny. But when you noticed dustballs rolling out from under the door somebody was going to have to get in there and clean and obviously it wasn’t going to be him.