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Closing Time and other stories
by Jack Ketchum
(Gauntlet Press, $55.00, 350 pages, January 2007.)
Review by William P Simmons
 A
literary auteur using language like a scalpel and the secret world of
the human heart as his canvas, Jack Ketchum is a poet of pathos, as
devoted to unearthing the emotions of his bruised and alienated characters
as their blood. His fiction captures the suffering, joy, madness, and
terror of modern life. Whereas Dallas Mayr is charming, friendly, and
compassionate, his dark half, Jack Ketchum, is a historian of loss and
revelation, tempting readers into the tragic underbelly of human depravity
with a lean, honest style and keen understanding of primal instinct.
Throughout the controversial evolution of his career, he brings readers
to unsuspected extremities of terror by showing them something far scarier
than the genre's usual focus on ghosts and beasties -- he shows them
themselves. His work is the dark mirror which reflects our worst moments
of violence, betrayal, unreason, and fury. Closing Time and Other
Stories, Ketchum's newest collection, emphasizes the base miseries
and dangers of everyday life -- on both extreme physical violence and
more importantly, the emotional catalysts and aftereffects of such.
With surprising dexterity, several of the stories also merge into moments
of surrealistic beauty, unearthing emotional/metaphysical borderlands
between everyday reality and the supernatural. No matter which aspect
of human experience he chooses to explore, his focus on human psychology
and transformative emotion remains intact.
In these pieces Ketchum refuses to veer from the animalistic urges
and the cold logic that leads to violence and betrayal, nor does he
blink from the wasteful agony and destruction of such acts. Violence
is brutal, betrayal devastating, and in a world where our hearts are
often as treacherous as the strangers we once thought were friends or
lovers, those people -- and, at times, our own minds/hearts -- are shown
to be our deadliest enemy. The best of these pieces induce us to stare
deep and long into our worst instincts so that we may better understand
the urges and reactions that control the fabric of our seemingly well-ordered
lives. All of it. Every dirty shame and humiliation. Each act of senseless
carnage, petty revenge, soul-shrinking terror or animal lust acted enacted
on characters who may or may not be better than their tormenters. Ambiguity
injects already suspenseful, terrifying plots and themes with greater
authenticity and philosophical depth. In this light, Ketchum's fiction
isn't only entertaining, sharp, and terrifying but, in addition, unapologetically
serious, devoted to better understanding the oh so inhuman human condition.
One would think that the mean-heartedness of some of these pieces clash
with stories that emphasize surprisingly effective tender renderings
of human darkness. This isn't true. While the author consciously sets
out to jar both the mind and our moral reflections by veering between
states of outrage and sympathetic despair, evoking love and hate in
equal measure, these emotions are examined with such honest passion
that we're swept up with the characters, soon unable to quite point
out where love turns to obsession and violence resembles mercy. Arguably,
Ketchum is at his best interweaving moments of passion with emotional
terror, capturing common 'working class' characters in all of their
diversity and hardships. This consistent juxtaposition of tenderness
and outrage makes for jarring reading. Ketchum isn't content to use
his art as a route for simple escapism. Rather, in such stories as --"Papa"
and "The Fountain" we're ushered into the confused
mechanics of hearts in conflict with themselves. Ketchum allows us to
see into the confused geographies -- the motivations and desires --
of the worst and weakest of our species, bringing to the forefront an
understanding (if not always sympathy) for the men and women who in
the morally ambiguous contexts of quick-moving plots are neither good
nor evil... Simply human. Here 'human' is both scary and magical enough.
Nineteen stories of tragedy and nightmare, compassion and funeral memory,
Closing Time is a bittersweet poem to the age we live and sigh
and die in.
Elsewhere in infinity plus:
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