Jack Ketchum began making up stories as a kid, messing around with plastic dinosaurs, soldiers, knights and cowboys in his room, in the woods near his house, or down by the brook. Who says there weren’t dinosaurs in the Old West? He gravitated toward any activity that didn’t demand too much socializing, like books, comics, movies, and radio rock ‘n roll. As a teenager he was befriended by Robert Bloch, who acted as his mentor and supported his writing until his death in 1994. Since publishing his first novel, Off Season in 1980 — which the Village Voice called violent pornography — he has written eighteen novels and novellas and five collections of short stories which together have earned him four Bram Stoker Awards and three further nominations. In 2011 he received the World Horror Convention’s Grand Master award for his contribution to the horror genre. Five of his novels have been adapted to film: The Lost, The Girl Next Door, Red, Offspring, and The Woman, the last written with Lucky McKee. Ketchum has made cameo appearances as bartender Teddy Panik in The Lost, a carnival worker in The Girl Next Door, another bartender in Red, coroner Max Joseph in Offspring, and a State Trooper in Edward Lee’s Header. Ketchum lives in New York City, where he was nearly killed by a chest of drawers plummeting out of the sky.
