Red – Book Review

by | Dec 17, 2014 | Book Reviews, Reviews | 0 comments

“You tell me why’s a man’s blood is any better or any more precious than a dog’s blood? It sure ain’t to the dog.” –Avery Allan Ludlow, Senior

Jack Ketchum, the nom de plume of Dallas Mayr, is a horror writer. However, his trade is that of the all-too-real horrors of everyday life, the tragedy of which being that such is wrought at the hands–not of zombies, vampires, ghosts, or other supernatural menaces–but Man. Ketchum hit the literary ground running with his debut novel, Off Season, before presenting what some consider to be his masterpiece nine years later, The Girl Next Door. Shortly thereafter, he was awarded four Bram Stoker Awards in the categories of Short Fiction, Collection, and Long Fiction, after which–in the middle of the closing decade of the twentieth century–he published Red, an indictment upon modernity’s bureaucratic red tape, which parades as justice while hypocritically obstructing it with the aide of class division and the sublimation of animal rights.

A plot synopsis of Red all but screams the all-too-rare presence of the seeming bedfellows that are animal rights and the horror genre as the latter becomes a metaphor for the former. Indeed, within the first few pages, like the exacting straightforward nature of Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Ketchum issues his reader the (bloody) conflict before proceeding to examine its consequences. During this time, we are introduced to Avery Ludlow, an old man with simple needs, a widower whose children have moved away from him for various reasons, and whose only solstice left to him is his dog, Red. One afternoon a group of teenagers appear upon the embankment where Avery and Red are fishing and, at the discovery that the fisherman has no valuables, shoots Red. Given the prologue, not only does Ketchum’s tale evoke notions of a gun-toting vigilante, à la Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down or Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, set to avenge the death of his beloved companion, such inherently equates the life of a human to be equal to that of an animal. However, in this context, many surprises–both good and bad–are in store for the reader.

First, the reader quickly comes to realize that the Kleist-esque storyline, cf. the German author’s novella Michael Kohlhass, is as patient, if not moreso, than its central character for it is a languid–albeit with intertexual justification (has a court case ever moved quickly?)–affair in which Avery tries to reason, as it were, with each and every rug upon the ladder before resorting to his own measures. As such, Ketchum’s agenda becomes multifaceted for, interestingly, the contradictions which we encounter at every turn as Avery tries to humbly appeal to the boys’ parents, courts, and media, are reflected in a person who eats fish, chicken, and beef without so as a second thought advocating a dog’s right to life. Fascinatingly, it is Avery’s naiveté, replete with bullheaded diligence to see justice done, that other poignant motifs are presented by way of our protagonist’s real conflict: modern society and, in turn, class conflict.

Avery is ignorant, not only of law, but of how and why modern society operates in the manner it does. We sympathize with the war veteran who remains traumatized after having been tossed at a young age into a world of clearly delineated right and wrong via good and bad and life and death as he adamantly seeks a higher justice. With earnest assiduousness, Avery refuses to kowtow to the political and monetary influence that his rival, Michael McCormack–the father of the boy who killed Red–exerts at every seeming corner of our hero’s world. It is with this that the reader nods when Avery, a blue-collar worker fighting for the rights of his deceased mutt dog, ironically utilizes the law to entrap his foes, the societal equivalent of a purebred, as he seizes upon a legal loophole that, however much McCormack or the courts would like to caulk the opening, no amount of money or clout can do because of the incorrigible thing known as hubris.

Yet the most impressive component of Ketchum’s story is his inclusion of a seemingly arbitrary chapter in which he describes one of Avery’s dreams. In it, Avery comes to realize that he is one of the bloodthirsty pack of wolves which are hunting him. As such, the author seems to contradict himself as he metaphorically aligns the malevolence of his central character’s advisories with Avery. However, in do doing, the segment aptly confronts the ethical logistics of the situation at hand in that Avery’s subconscious is attempting to alert him to the fact that he is lowering himself to the evils which he is fighting.

Jack Ketchum’s novel, Red, is a fable for modern society which does not allow the reader to rest easy despite moral restitution being garnered in the end. This is due to the fact that, though not culpable given his ignorance of social dictums and dogmas, Avery doggedly forces a situation which an honest reader cannot claim as a victory for it results in avoidable death. In this respect, Red is truly a twenty-first century text for, in true Hitchcockian fashion, it issues a happy ending which vainly attempts to veil the irrefutable dilemma that life is not as we would necessarily like it to be (contrary to what Hollywood tells us) because, as Avery comes to learn, such is rarely black or white and many, many concessions have to be made along the way where no party ever sits completely content at the end of the day. In the end, Ketchum obliges us to assess how content we are with the conclusion and, more importantly, why. Perhaps this is the reason Red was first published in Britain in 1995 before appearing seven years later in America . . .

– Egregious Gurnow

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