Book Review: The Woman

[Note: This review was first published this past Wednesday, but the post was lost when the Blogger server went down the following day.]

The Woman by Jack Ketchum and Lucky McKee (Dorchester Publishing, 2011)

The Woman is the third installment (following Off Season and Offspring) in the classic series of novels concerning modern-day cannibals, but actually reads more like the Ketchum books Right to Life and The Girl Next Door.  This time around, the titular predator--the last survivor of the animalistic clan that terrorized the town of Dead River, Maine in the previous novel--has been captured by a tyrannical, misogynistic lawyer.  Christopher Cleek (who is about as balanced as a one-legged table) chains the Woman in his fruit cellar, abuses and rapes her, and even involves his own family in the ostensible domestication of the wild creature.

Ketchum (I refer to him singularly, since it's hard to say how much of a hand Lucky McKee--the director of the film version of The Woman--had in writing the actual book) thus hearkens back to a familiar plot paradigm with this tale of sadistic imprisonment.  The novel is more of a slow-boiler, lacking the sense of urgency created by the compressed time frame in Off Season and Offspring. 
Transforming the Woman into an almost sympathetic character--and holding her in captivity for the bulk of the narrative--makes for a risky authorial decision, since it diffuses the frisson generated by this established menace.  Suspense suffers, because the reader fully expects the Woman to break free of her bonds by book's end and wreak havoc on her tormentors.  To his credit, though, Ketchum does throw his readers a wicked curve when he reveals the Cleeks' guiltiest secret, hitherto hidden away in the family barn (a situation that reinforces the American Gothicism of the Joe Jackson lyric--"In every dream home / A nightmare"--employed as an epigraph to the novel).

The author makes strong use of alternating viewpoints, juxtaposing the mindsets of the Cleek family members and the Woman and blurring the line between civilization and savagery.  But perhaps Ketchum's most impressive talent on display here is his ability to dramatize the ongoing power struggle between the sexes--between (mad)man and Woman, husband and wife, father and daughter, brother and sister.  In this novel, even a simple game of tetherball in the schoolyard resonates thematically, with males and females facing off in not-always-friendly competition.  Such well-crafted scenes help prove that Ketchum is no mere shock jock; his fiction is as sophisticated as it is blood-drenched.

If The Woman deviates from the formula of the first two books in the series, the bonus novella "Cow" returns readers to more familiar ground: savage attacks on unsuspecting sojourners into the wilderness, detailed descriptions of the (literal) butchery of murdered humans, bouts of gory gormandizing.  In this quintessential captivity narrative, the hapless Donald Fischer recounts a harrowing tale of forced assimilation into the Woman's new family unit.  Admittedly, I was thrown by the penultimate line of Donald's journal (a question of continuity: could a certain character have reached puberty already, if not even two years have passed since the events of The Woman?), but that bit of confusion did not spoil the novella's overall effect.

The Woman might not rank with Ketchum's greatest work, but it is still a highly enjoyable book.  Though certainly not for the weak of stomach, it will be relished by anyone with a taste for unflinching, emotionally-honest horror.