Peaceable Kingdom

Dustjacket by Neal McPheeters

Doom in a plain carboard box. A snake in the grass. A captive with a rose tattoo. The innocent-looking letter in your mailbox that can kill you or set you free. The rifle hidden away in a young boy's closet. Closing time in a Manhattan bar just days after 9/11. Punishment that actually suits the crime for a change. A parrot in a strip-joint. Sleazy bimbos and parted lovers. A UFO. A Western. A vampire for godsakes. Zombies. Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, twins. Cats and dogs and a dancing lynx.

Welcome to the dark -- and diverse -- world of Jack Ketchum.

In his introduction to Peaceable Kingdom he talks about his readers.

They know that every now and then you're gonna get lucky and pure gold like King and Straub's Black House will simply drop into your lap at the local supermarket but after that, if your bent is horror and suspense fiction, you're gonna have to get your hands dirty and root around for more. Find a Ramsey Campbell or an Edward Lee. They expect diversity and search it out. They want what all good readers want -- to be taken somewhere in a book or story that's really worth visiting for a while. Maybe even worth thinking about after.

If that place happens to scare the hell out of you, all the better.

Ketchum is best known for his novels. But it's not for nothing that he's twice won the Bram Stoker Award for best short fiction either -- for "The Box" and "Gone", both collected here. Besides, if you have read all his novels practically back to back to get some notion of his range, Peaceable Kingdom aims to correct that.

And he will scare the hell out of you.

Contents:

• The Holding Cell
• The Business
• The Box
• The Turning
• Redemption
• Rabid Squirrels in Love
• The Work
• Amid the Walking Wounded
• Firedance
• Megan's Law
• Father and Son
• Forever
• Luck
• Sundays
• The Best
• Gone
• The Haunt
• Lines: or Like Franco, Elvis is Still Dead
• Mother and Daughter
• Returns
• Twins
• Chain Letter
• The Rifle
• The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard
• If Memory Serves
• Snakes
• The Great San Diego Sleazy Bimbo Massacre
• To Suit the Crime
• The Rose
• When the Penny Drops
• Mail Order
• Winter Child
• The Visitor

Limited edition limited to 750 signed copies in full cloth and sold out at the publisher