Interview With The Women Author Jack Ketchum

Interview done by Michael Wilkerson

MW: Please introduce yourself?

JK: Hi, I’m Jack Ketchum.  I write suspense, horror, and the occasional dark comedy.  Fourteen novels, four story collections, maybe half a dozen novellas or so, and five feature films — two of which I scripted — under my belt so far…

MW: Tell me about your newest project The Woman?

JK: THE WOMAN’s a novel and a movie, both of them sequels to OFFSPRING, about a pack of modern-day cannibals roaming the coast of Maine.  In THE WOMAN, she’s the only one left, and she’s about to be hunted down herself — by a very strange man.

MW: How did the movie project come about?

JK: The director Lucky McKee and I loved Pollyanna McIntosh’s performance in OFFSPRING and decided that she needed a movie all her own, one where she’d be the major focus of the story.  I’d killed her off in both the novel and my screenplay for OFFSPRING but the director of that one, Andrew Van den Houten, made an “executive decision” to keep her alive, thinking he just might have a franchise on his hands.  And we’re glad he did.

MW: How much input did you have into the movie?

JK: A lot,  I mean, Lucky and I co-wrote both the book and screenplay.  Then I was on hand during almost the entire shoot for the film and we’d discuss things nightly.  On a few occasions logistics or lack of time forced us to more or less rewrite on the spot, so we did, and I think that strangely, each change made for a better movie.

MW: Do you feel the movie came across the way you envisioned it?

JK: Absolutely.  Even better than I envisioned it.  Lucky’s one hell of a director, and the cast and crew were filled with talented, committed people.  It shows.

MW: You have been doing horror novels for a very long time. What do you think of the zombie crave?

JK: (You mean craze here.)  Hey, I like zombies.  I wrote two stories using the undead as a jumping-off point and I enjoyed doing them.  There are a lot of books and movies which aren’t very original around, but when you get one which is original it can be a lot of fun.  In fact I just finished Carleton Mellick III’s novel ZOMBIES AND SHIT.  It’s crazy and delightful.

MW: Do you watch or read very much horror stuff yourself?

JK: I watch a lot, read less.  It seems important to me that I read all kinds of things, not just in-genre.  But I’m always a sucker for a good hour and a half of horror movie.

MW: Give me a day in your life?

JK: Which day?  The busy one or the lazy one?  When I’m writing a novel, I normally get up at nine, read for about an hour over coffee, then work for about four hours (that’s if it’s new stuff — if it’s rewriting I can go seven hours with a lunch break) until I go brain-dead.  At around four in the afternoon I feed the cats, and around four-thirty head over to my local bar to spend a couple of hours with friends, then come home and cook dinner, eat same, and watch a movie or two or read some more.  I’m rarely in bed by midnight.

MW: Take me through the process of writing a novel?

JK: Everybody’s process is different.  Mine starts with a theme, something I want to say.  Then I get the characters down — I won’t write anything unless I know my characters first.  Actual plot comes last.  I have a bulletin board in front of me and I’ll put up post-it notes or bar napkins or whatever with ideas on them for pretty much everything — character notes, setting, plot points any kind of detail — and I add to them or take them off the board once they’re used as I go along.

MW: What plans do you have for 2012 as projects go?

JK: Another screenplay, some short stories — I haven’t done them in a while so I’m looking forward to going back to that form — maybe a novel.  We’ll see.

MW: What would you like to say in closing?

JK: Thanks for giving me this forum.  Keep reading, folks, and as the Greeks say, ne pas sto kala — go with the good.