Biografia

Stephen King wrote about him, "Ketchum has become a kind of hero to those of us who write tales of terror and suspense.".

Sold a number of early short stories under the pseudonym "Jerzy Livingston," based on the town in which he grew up, Livingston, New Jersey.

Before becoming a full-time writer, he worked as a garbage-man, a lumber salesman, a copywriter, editor of the paleontological magazine "Fossils," and as a literary agent for Scott Meredith, Inc., where he served as agent for author Henry Miller.

He worked in theater, first as a drama reviewer, then in New York's off-off-Broadway. A theater company produced a few of Ketchum's one-act plays (two of which he directed) in summer stock repertory.

Ketchum's short story "The Box" won a 1994 Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Short Fiction; another, "Gone," won the same award in 2000, and "The Haunt" was nominated in 2002.

I hope I do [i.e., write about] victims pretty well. Because I proceed from them. For me the victim makes the story. Sometimes you victimize yourself, sometimes somebody does it to you, but it's that almost universal sense we have - we've all been hurt, and I like to open doors to those feelings. ... Everybody's broken. Some rise above it. These are the people I want to write about. A lot of my stuff is thinly-veiled wishes for empowerment for people I care about.

People *scare me*. And what they do to one another, just for fun sometimes, is appalling. There was a guy not too long ago, a guy and a woman, whose dog wouldn't obey. So they tied him behind the car, and dragged him at thirty miles an hour until the dog was a bloody mess. So that's scary to me.

Everything influences my fiction. Conversations in bars, loves, losses of same, TV, movies, cocktail napkins, news clips, friends' confessions. I get permission, then I use it.

[re his novel "The Lost"] Everyone in the book is lost to some degree. Even the poor cat. But when I conceived it, I was thinking about those kids in that ear who fell between the cracks, who neither went to war nor to college, and what an open, empty world was left to them. That, and how lost the entire era was. And again, you're right: loss is the entire theme. Nobody wins in this book. Even the survivors are diminished.

When I'm writing at my best, what I'm trying to do, I find, is to point out how some people poison the world for the rest of us, who are only trying to live humanely and lovingly. It's a warning against the "others," and a call to awareness, strength, and gentleness.