The book’s second part provides the payoff to that meandering but tantalizing setup. In the first, the narrator, local young man Dan, meets visiting college kids Casey, Kim and Steven engages in some drinking and daring with them falls for beautiful, wild Casey (they have sex in a graveyard) and learns what impels her to take risks: years ago, she was sexually abused by her fatherAabuse that led to the death of her younger brother. Set during summer in the Maine coastal town of Dead River, the book divides into two parts. That’s a shame, not only because Mayr’s career nose-dived commercially after that (though he’s still writing and publishing), but because Hide and Seek is a good novel, strong and true, scary yet uplifting in the classic horror manner. Perhaps because of the outrage the book engendered, Ketchum’s second novel, Hide and Seek, received little support from its publisher when it appeared in mass market in 1984. ” In the early 1980s, Ketchum (the pseudonym of Dallas Mayr) published in paperback as gruesome and taut a horror novel as anyone had seen: Off Season. Where something lurks waiting in the dark… It’s a need that finds them at last in an old abandoned house at night, a house reputed to be haunted, where phantom lights burn in broken windows. And gradually becomes the fourth member of the group–the poor relation.īut the games need escalation. For Casey the thrill’s the thing and the riskier the better.ĭan falls for her, hard.

She’s not opposed to stealing caviar or cars or running around naked in graveyards. The most daring of the three is a beautiful, troubled girl name Casey. When the college kids arrive, that changes.

He works in a lumberyard hauling two-by-fours and furring around all day with a forklift. And they do, in spades.ĭan’s a local and didn’t get a chance to go to college. So that when a trio of friends, rich college kids, arrive there on a forced march with their parents for summer vacation they have to make their own amusements. Even now, sixty-odd years later, there’s not much to do, not much going on. The Great Depression hit hard and never let go. Not ever…ĭead River’s a sleepy little town on the coast of Maine without much going for it. Games you might even want to play yourself if you’re with the right people.

Jack ketchum dead river series