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NOTE: Reviews are the opinions of the individual reviewers and not necessarily those of The Chiaroscuro as an entity unto itself.
| by William D. Gagliani
Email: tarkusp@execpc.com Broken on the Wheel of Sex By Jack Ketchum Sideshow Press (limited numbered, signed edition; currently OoP) This thin, handsome volume hides a nasty secret. In the Seventies, men's magazines (a category which encompasses both the stroke mags and the more serious attempts at lifestyle publications) published quite a lot of fiction, not all of it pure porn. Everybody knows the pantheon of famous authors published by Playboy and, to a lesser extent, Penthouse. Other examples of "those" magazines included Cavalier, Swank, Genesis, Gallery, Nugget, Stag, High Society, Club, and Oui (as well as the twin holy grails published by Hefner and Guccione). I should know—I still have form rejections from most of them, which probably tells you way too much about my high school, uh, reading habits. In any case, while they weren't publishing *me*, Cavalier was showcasing the early work of one Stephen King, for instance. Another author getting his chops in the men's mags was Jack Ketchum, he of the legendary novels Off Season, Ladies' Night, The Lost, and so many more. Jerzy Livingston was Ketchum's "nom-de-porn" and reading these stories now as if for the first time, it's striking to note that very few of them are "erotic" in the common use of the term. Sex scenes are short and rarely seem erotic at all. Ketchum's recurring character, Stroup ("Proust sounded out phonetically and scrambled") almost boils over with barely concealed anger and even contempt for the women he chases as if it were genetically imperative for him to do, perhaps laying bare the underlying sexism of the era far better than any expose`. Ketchum says of Stroup: "A boozer. A loser. A homophobe. A highly questionable friend and unreliable lover. Mysogynist as hell and for the most part proud of it ... in the bars back then you met him all the time." As if to underscore this interpretation, editors refused to buy the only story in which Stroup acts selflessly toward a woman! In "The Hang-Up," Stroup explores bondage, but what's really on his mind is revenge. In "Skin Game," he plots to use a sexy game he's invented to manipulate his woman and her friend. In the story published as "Fixing Her Plumbing," Stroup "teaches" a publishing industry wannabe a little lesson. In first person or third, Stroup's the life of the party! What is ultimately most fascinating about these stories is that they display characteristics that would adorn Ketchum's novels later. There's a nihilism, a fatalistic streak working its way through the fiction which must have struck a chord with readers and which must have indicated the times' true predatory, vindictive nature, hidden successfully beneath the glitz of loud music and flashing lights we most associate with the period. The non-Stroup stories are less hard-edged. They're steeped in Seventies counterculture: the almost off-hand drug dealing in foreign lands, the "tomorrow never comes" mentality of a period shoehorned between the revolutionary Sixties and the materialistic Eighties. There's a near-nostalgic sense of loss in these stories, of being lost—a career not quite working, relationships not quite working, and exotic travel almost as a survival technique and nearly as imperative as the mating. Autobiographical in nature except, the author notes, for the drug trafficking, Ketchum's Greek tales achieve a softer, more erotic tone than the Stroup stories while still reflecting the overall Seventies zeitgeist. "Old Men Dancing," "The Liar," "The Rubdown," and "The French" all take place in Greece. "Head Games" is a rather pat tale of scams people play. "The Christmas Caller" may be the most erotic story in the book. And "Dead Heat" is a bit of noir send-up that doesn't quite fit with the others but ends the book on a chuckle rather than a downer. All told, these thirteen stories form an interesting subtext to the work of a writer whose sharp, blade-between-the-ribs fiction has often pushed the boundaries of extreme horror out to where there are no boundaries. None of these tales is even remotely categorizable as horror, yet a similar layer of darkness permeates their structure as if their protagonists are the same who might later find themselves victims or perpetrators of horror in a Ketchum novel. Anyone interested in the development of Ketchum's style or later explorations into dark psyches may well find food for thought in these tales of sex made into weaponry and wielded like a nail-studded club. Read at your own risk, and enjoy—if you dare. |
