It's Not Nice to Piss Off Mother Nature

by Tony Fonseca

01/17/2005

Ketchum, Jack. She Wakes. New York: Dorchester-Leisure, 2004. 1984. 355 p.

Jack Ketchum, although he is a Bram Stoker Award winner whose name always shows up on the best horror fiction lists and even on the genre's best websites (such as http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk), isn't really known for novels dealing with the supernatural. However, he is known for his borderline splatterpunk treatment of violence, and for his penchant for writing over-the-top, grotesque sexual scenes filled with decadent eroticism (I would rate him third, behind only Charlee Jacob and John Shirley). The only instance where Ketchum's sexual violence does meet the supernatural is in She Wakes, originally published in 1984, and (fortunately for fans) reissued this year by the Leisure Books imprint of Dorchester Press.

Publisher's Weekly does go a bit overboard when it states that "Ketchum does here for Greece what Lovecraft did for New England and Stoker did for Transylvania, creating a landscape imbued with a numinous quality that's simultaneously beautiful and terrible." For one thing, it would be difficult for any writer to fill the shoes of Lovecraft and Stoker, even in a single text. Also, Lovecraft, THE pre-King benchmark author in the genre, created multi-layered eerie landscapes by continually revisiting his haunted New England locales in various fictions. Nonetheless, Ketchum's Grecian landscape is unforgettable, perhaps owing to the fact that, as the author states in an interview with Gene Gregorits of Sex and Guts magazine (http://www.sexandgutsmagazine.com/ketchum.htm), "Greece is a place that has always really spoken to me in a spiritual way. I find it very big. Very spooky, in a good way. Very few other places have done that."

Like Elizabeth Hand's Waking the Moon, or many of the novels of Phil Rickman, She Wakes has as its basic premise the idea that the Old Gods and Goddesses, in this case Mother Nature, will only stand idly by for so long before returning to destroy the human race for plundering the natural world. Where Ketchum's novel differs from other tales of this nature is in his strength as a writer of violent relationships. For nearly half of the novel, its "monster," a mysterious woman named Leila, is nothing more than a female stalker. Vacationing in Greece from what she claims as her hometown, Quebec, she meets Robert Dodgson and his friend Danny, two American sightseers. She and Dodgson, a writer, hit it off immediately when they meet at a nude beach, but before long he finds her to be overly possessive, to the point where she verbally (and eventually physically) attacks any woman he talks to. After she attacks Xenia, a local waitress and Dodgson's friend, with a handful of lit cigarettes, she is killed accidentally--and that is when Ketchum turns his stalker novel into something more insidious.

The story, however, begins with the introduction of Jordan Thayer Chase, another American who owes his success as a businessman to his psychic abilities, as well as his extrasensory sensitivity to ancient sacred places. When he visits the tomb of Agamemnon, he experiences a prophetic vision. This vision becomes important later in the novel, for it is of the Greek island called Delos where he senses he will die, and this island, coincidentally, where the novel's main characters will eventually run while trying to escape Leila as vengeful Earth Goddess. Leila is first introduced as an alluring but disturbed woman, who insinuates herself into the lives of a group of American and British tourists. At first her presence is merely disruptive, but Leila, like the clairvoyant Chase, has tapped into the mystical energy of Greece. This leads to her becoming an avatar of the goddess known variously as Selene, Artemis and Hecate. Her full potential is unleashed after her death when a violent Frenchman and his henchmen (Sadlier, Dulac and Ruth) steal her corpse, and Sadlier, who has been promised immortality in a vision, defiles the corpse sexually. 

The strength of She Wakes is in Ketchum's love for Greece, which comes out in his descriptions of the land and its native inhabitants, such as in passages where an aged flower vendor makes his appearance. First, Dodgson hears him coming around the corner, barking his wares, at which time he tells the others in his party to watch what happens when the vendor makes his appearance. As Dodgson predicted, the old man turns the corner, and immediately begins posing as Polaroid camera flashes begin going off. Ketchum handles scenes like this, bar scenes and images of relaxing afternoons on beaches with aplomb. I was also impressed with how he managed a story with some ten major characters in it: each chapter is brief and has a character's name as its title (for the most part). That character may or may not be the point of view of the chapter, but is nonetheless the focus of the action. Either way readers are constantly reminded of who characters are, and what their relationships are in this fashion, and it makes a complex narrative more readable. But of course what makes a horror novel work is how well its writer can evoke fear, apprehension, discomfort, and sometimes disgust. This reviewer is not someone who responds to horror fiction with a fear impulse (if I were, I'd be a fool to continue reading the stuff). However, I found Ketchum's prose to be well suited for fans who enjoy an eerie read. The scenes with cats and snakes are absolutely wonderful, and the grotesqueries that make up the sexual relationship between Leila and Sadlier some readers may find stomach churning.

The one complaint I have about She Wakes is that as the action nears its end and the seven major characters escape to Delos, Xenia and a bisexual nightclub performer named Eduardo become the sixth and seventh man in Ketchum's "landing party" and are summarily dispatched of. One of my pet peeves in horror is the authorial need to weed out minor characters while preserving those who play major roles, to the point where the reader can play "guess who's gonna die" the second a character is introduced--and more than likely win that guessing game.

But this is a minor issue, one that can be easily placed into perspective given Ketchum's awe inspiring recreation of Selene /Artemis/Hecate as a ghostly figure clad in white, striding forth in all her glory, accompanied--as Hecate--by a gruesome entourage of deformed zombies. Ketchum shows almost an insider's understanding of the mysteries of Greek mythology, including the bloodthirstiness of the gods' and goddesses' darker aspects. This is contemporary horror at its best, tempered by an appreciation of the Greco-Roman understanding of the monster's function as a divine warning. Maybe that is something we should seriously think about before we start drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge.