2002, Leisure Horror, originally released in 1995, 211 pages

Jack Ketchum slots as a horror writer. But Red, like The Passenger, and Joy Ride, is much more like Harm City fiction, about the evil that men do, and how decent people attempt to deal with it. I am tempted to call Mister Ketchum ‘the Louis L’Amour of situational horror’. Like L’Amour’s fast paced westerns, a Ketchum novel gets eaten by your eyes in an afternoon. Jack has the capacity to draw a character with depth in a sentence or two, and keep layering perspective-based humanity that builds to an epiphany.

Avery Ludlow is a Korean War vet living in Moody Point Maine. There is plenty of tragedy in his past, and his only solace is Red, the dog his dear departed wife brought home 17 years past. Avery is out fishing with Red when some rich boys come by and kill the loyal dog for pure sport. The story sets up like a classic revenge adventure. Ketchum makes Red far more than a dark fantasy. In his hands this sad story that plays out every day in America—at least once—becomes a journey into the human condition.

To give a taste of Ketchum’s style here are a few brief passages:

“something fled”

“creature to creature in a world of souls”

“Death was the uninhabited dark.”

‘Through these gates we pass.”

In the end Red is about the capacity for empathy and decency to persist, if not triumph, in a world ruled by the most evil among us, under the afflictive laws that assure their spawn will be just as fat and rotten as they.