The Lost 

By Jack Ketchum
Leisure $5.99 

Warning Note: there may be some slight SPOILERS in the following essay, so if you haven't read the novel, perhaps you should read only the first two paragraphs and the last paragraph, skipping the middle altogether. 

Jack Ketchum (Dallas Mayr) catapulted to the crowded top of my current favorites list through his hard-hitting and relentlessly violent tragic sagas of life and death. The ruthless portrayals of an almost unconscious, elemental evil evoke terror well beyond that of the supernatural tale for me, because they're the kind of evil you see on CNN every day. State-sanctioned executions, royal families murdered, innocent children drowned by their mother, religious rioting in Ulster and Palestine, tourists kidnapped from tropical resorts, and the occasional British serial murderer (just in the last several weeks). The evil of these things is tangible because it's always out there, waiting for you to stumble into its arms. Who knows whether it's supernatural or not - when faced with a sudden manifestation of evil, one's not likely to question its supernatural qualities (unless one is a horror writer!). The visceral approach to horror works best for this reviewer, and it's what Ketchum has done so often in novels such as OFF SEASON and LADIES' NIGHT.  

In THE LOST, Ketchum tacks in a slightly different direction. Rather than hit the ground running and never braking the juggernaut of violence, a well-known trademark, here he opens with a traditional scene of visceral violence but then steps back and slows the pace intentionally, avoiding all-out violence for a record number of pages, exploring a multitude of points of view. 

In 1965 New Jersey, teenagers Jennifer and Tim witness the murder of two young women campers at the hands of their diminutive and appropriately named Ray Pye. The "lesbo" campers become the focus of Ray's cold rage and hatred because they kiss and one of them, caught naked, had turned down his advances (clearly "lezzie!") - and Ray's psychotic mind twists these separate elements into a reason it would be fun to watch them die. He follows through with a .22 rifle, killing one and - to his shame - allowing one to escape and fall into a four-year coma. 

When the 1969 narrative opens, the comatose camper has just died. Charlie Schilling, the local cop who has always known deep in his bones that the impermeable Ray Pye is the shooter, decides it's time to start a new campaign against the smart-ass kid who beat his interrogation time and again. His former partner, the widower Ed, who retired from the force and is now dating a much younger local girl, warns Charlie against pushing Ray too hard, but when the chance arrives he helps. Ray continues to brazenly sell drugs to younger kids, have sex with a series of star-struck teenage girls, and harbor the secret of what happened that night, when he learned first-hand that he enjoyed taking human life. Jennifer and Tim are like a stoned-out posse, both adoring and slightly resentful of Ray, but both are caught in his orbit with no escape velocity potential. 

Ray is a true manifestation of elemental evil, eventually reflecting the Manson slaughter which occurs during the narrative. Sly, egotistical, obsessive, vengeful, and forever feeling inferior enough to increase his 5-foot-3 with crushed beer cans and newspaper stuffed inside his wear-everywhere boots, Ray is cool by force of will, living in his own decked-out bachelor pad carved out of his mother's motel (her home on the hill out back, shades of "Psycho" as Ketchum acknowledges), and inspiring both fear and awe among the younger kids he uses and abuses, but who would die for a chance to spin in his orbit. Jennifer ignores Tim, preferring Pye-in-the-sky sex which ranks lower and lower on Ray's interest scale now that he's smitten with the new rich girl in town, the lovely as a wild filly Katherine Wallace, and with the new motel chamber maid, the natural and brainy beauty Sally Richmond, who just happens to be the college-bound senior scandalously dating Ed, the former cop. 

The pieces in place and facing each other, the game begins when Charlie Schilling starts to push Ray into a corner. From that point on, Ketchum winds the sense of foreboding tighter and tighter like an overcoiled watch spring. You can smell the dynamite, but you can't quite see it. You wait for the release of small side explosions, the valves that would let off the building steam pressure of a summer both heavenly and hellish, the Summer of 1969, Woodstock and the Tate-LaBianca murders, but the explosions never come. Every situation that could be an explosion - and there are many - is defused, which does indeed raise the level of suspense but, to be honest, also the level of frustration. Perhaps because Ketchum is taking his time, or perhaps because you suspect that the climax can't possibly measure up to the build-up. Has an asset turned into a problem? I admit that the thought crossed my mind. Has Ketchum strayed too far from his usual formula? 

But then no, the events that have spun closer and closer together finally collide and the explosions that never came are finally loosed, and the town of Sparta in New Jersey in the mad summer of 69 explodes like the mind and ego of Ray Pye, who never did get rid of that rifle he'd used in the woods, and who never did forget just how much he enjoyed using it. When it's time for payback, Ray's spree manages to shock because Ray has been so unpredictable. It's hard to guess where he'll go and what he'll do, and surprises are not out of the question. 

And as the entire country mourns its loss of innocence in the summer of 69, with Vietnam and the moon landing and Manson and Woodstock and protests and a strange co-mingling of the old fashioned and the newfangled, that's finally what Ketchum has to say, and he lets Ray Pye sort of say it for him in a brilliant, shocking finale. Only the fact that in this brilliant final explosion of innocence-shattering violence the voice of Ray, his skewed point of view, fades from the scene just when I wanted it most, only this ends up tarnishing what is otherwise a superb novel layered with so much nostalgic truth about us all, love and hate, loyalty and betrayal, and finally the cold reality of the modern world. What can I say, but ... wow.