Countdown: The Top 20 Jack Ketchum Works of Short Fiction--#8

[For the previous entry on the Countdown, click here.]

#8. "Megan's Law"

"Well, what the hell would you do?" confrontational narrator Albert Walker asks in the opening line of "Megan's Law" (1999; collected in Peaceable Kingdom).  This arresting hook generates instant suspense, as the reader can't help but wonder what Albert actually has gone and done.

Albert relates an encounter with police officer legally required to inform that a "tier-three high risk sex criminal," Philip Knott, has moved in two doors down from his home.  Hearing this, Albert is immediately concerned for the safety of his twelve-year-old daughter Michele (whom he has previously protected from her "crazy rumdrum [and now deceased] miserable excuse of a mother"). He grows even more distraught over--and obsessed with--his new neighbor after learning the horrid details (from a gossiping bartender) of the child-raping Knott's crimes.  It soon becomes apparent that the officer's initial warning to Albert "against vigilantism" has been given in vain.

The brilliance of Ketchum's story lies in its manipulation of readerly sympathy.  Alternating Albert's narrative with passages of Knott's italicized thoughts, "Megan's Law" juxtaposes an extremely devoted father and an ostensibly rehabilitated sex criminal.  Knott (whose surname suggests both negation and entanglement) emerges as a vulnerable figure when he considers the dark side of the titular piece of legislation:

This Megan's Law thing.  It fucks you up! Out in California they firebombed this guy's car, torched the poor bastard, burnt him to death.  In Connecticut they got this other guy, about twenty-five of them, beat the shit out of him, somebody they thought did stuff but it was a case of mistaken identity, they fucked up, they got the wrong guy.  It'd be funny if it wasn't so fucking scary.  What people are capable of.

Knott, though, is no innocent, and is still struggling with some highly illicit urges: "I want to fuck something silly. I want to fuck something till it screams," the man admits at the end of one passage.  But then (as Albert meantime plots to put a "stop" to this "running sore") Knott begins his next section of the narrative by amending: "I want to fuck something till it screams but I won't.  Not in the immediate future anyway.  That I'm pretty sure of.  I think I maybe can actually do this thing.  Maybe.  Maybe it's the meds or maybe it's just being free now not in Rahway anymore and not obsessing all the time."  Knott thinks he stands a chance of assuming a normal life, not realizing that Albert is about to mete out a violent death. 

Albert steals a jeep, dons a ski mask, then runs over Knott twice as the man crosses his own front lawn en route to his driveway.  When Albert backs up the vehicle a second time, he remorselessly observes "that my left front tire had rolled over his neck, that the Wagoneer's weight had pretty much disconnected his head from his body and had flattened his neck like roadkill which in fact was exactly what the little fucker was now."  The threat-eliminating father enjoys "a busy and productive day at work," but his daughter Michele is shaken up that night after learning of Knott's murder.  "So I did what I usually do," Albert admits:

I took her to bed.

I comforted her.

What would you do? 

A signature Ketchum twist, belatedly revealing the true reason Albert was so bent on keeping Knott away from Michele.  Albert's interrogative refrain takes an abruptly alienating turn in the closing line, as no sane reader is likely to agree with such a course of incestuous solace.  Nevertheless, by closing with a question the story throws down a moral gauntlet, forces each one of us to consider what we are really capable of when it comes to sheltering our loved ones from the world's various harms.  The honest answer here could prove as shocking and unsettling as "Megan's Law" itself.