A Taste for Ketchum

I’ve been a fan of Jack Ketchum for a long time, but left a few of his books unread until this year. (I reviewed one of those a couple weeks ago.) Dallas Mayr (1946-2018) while still a soda jerk began his literary career with short stories and articles in second tier magazines under the name Jerzy Livingston. (He was originally from Livingston NJ.) He gained notoriety, however, under the pen name Jack Ketchum with his 1980 first novel Off Season, the success of which seems to have surprised his own publisher Ballantine Books. A couple dozen books followed. Ketchum writes primarily in the horror genre. He is a multiple Bram Stoker Award winner and in 2011 won the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award.

Closing Time and Other Stories, which arrived in the mail a few days ago, contains 19 of his short stories. Jack adds a brief explanation after each story about what inspired it. Usually it was some personal experience that he embellished and gave a dark twist. There is a revenge tale about smokers in a Greek restaurant/tavern on the West Side of Manhattan, a spooky “honor system” motel with no night manager on a dark misty Florida highway, a suicide hotline operator who couldn’t be more wrong for the job, a patient who omits key details with his therapist, a sadistic robber, and a child’s 911 call. There isn’t a bad story in the bunch; each is well plotted, well-presented, creepy in a good way, and (except for the couple with ghostly elements) all too credible.

Not everyone, of course, would agree. Ketchum writes well – even his critics admit that – but he also writes in-your-face graphically, which in horror fiction can be quite gruesome. He omits no detail just for being unseemly. Because of this, and despite the commercial success of Off Season, Ballantine rejected his next novel Ladies Night, which offended the publisher’s reader. (Ladies Night found success later with another publisher.) The Village Voice reviewer in 1980 chided Ballantine for having published Off Season because of the violence. Sometimes other elements offend some readers. Regarding the origin of one of the short stories in Closing Time Ketchum writes, “Nanci Kalantra had asked me for a piece for Horrorworld Online and liked the story very much but said that it seemed that the only thing which outraged her readers at all seemed to be explicit sex. Not explicit horrors…” Ketchum is not alone in sometimes offending readers. J.G. Ballard, one of the finest prose writers of the 20^th century (predominately but not exclusively of sci-fi), received a publisher’s rejection for his 1973 novel Crash accompanied by the note on the manuscript, “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.” Crash, in which cultists find erotic satisfaction in auto crashes, found another publisher, is critically well-regarded, and has been continuously in print ever since.

Ultimately what we find acceptable is (tautologically) a matter of taste. Yet, this raises an old question. We know that some people’s taste (whether for coffee, music, literature, or art) is more refined than that of others, but is “refined” (which often means simply more knowledgeable) actually better? Is it wrong to prefer Twisted Sister to Georg Solti? Are there fundamental criteria for taste that make the judgment of some people more right than the judgment of others? Committedly religious folk often think so as do committed ideologues, and for similar reasons: for them “tasteful” equals “approved propaganda,” whether or not it twists the truth about the human heart and nature. Bad taste is whatever undermines the agenda. Among more deliberative secular thinkers, opinions have varied. Plato thought the answer was yes; he concluded that good taste was a search for beauty and that beauty is truth. (I think he was wrong about that for all his dialectics: the truth is often ugly.) Aristotle was less idealistic but still agreed the answer was yes; he tried to give some limited guidance in the dramatic arts with his influential prescription for a good (i.e. tasteful) dramatic script in Poetics. The more practical Romans gave us the phrase de gustibus non est disputandum (there’s no accounting for taste), which is a no. In the Enlightenment philosophers took another stab at it since it seemed to them that some things were plainly more tasteful than others, so there must be a way to explain why. Wrote Alexander Gerard in his Essay on Taste (1759), “But the maxim [de gustibus] is false and pernicious, when applied to that intellectual taste, which has for its objects the arts and sciences.” Yet by tortured reasoning he ended by conflating “refined” with “tasteful,” which is a conclusion not much different from his premise. David Hume (1711-1776) did a little better by distinguishing between sentiments and determinations. The former (essentially: “I just like it”) are purely subjective but the latter are not. Therefore we can judge, for example, a musical composition by making (objective) determinations of its technical merit independently of whether we (subjectively) fancy it. So, we can say in the same sentence, “Yes, it’s very good, but I don’t like it much.” This has the ring of truth to it. 20^th and 21^st century cultural critics by and large have returned to the de gustibus dictum as a stated philosophy, yet it’s pretty clear that they don’t really believe it: they make critical pronouncements about taste all the time, which would be impossible if they believed it.

I don’t think we’re likely to do much better than Hume, so I’m sticking with him, at least for now. With regard to Ketchum in particular, my determination is that he is a fine writer and my sentiment is that I like him. Someone else’s taste may differ.

The Cramps - You've Got Good Taste