Stranglehold by Jack Ketchum

Stranglehold is a gritty, visceral novel that is totally Jack Ketchum. Ketchum pulls no punches in his fiction. His writing is not for the feint of heart, and this novel certainly fits that bill. In this novel Lydia McCloud marries Arthur Danse, thinking he is the man of her dreams. Things are good with them for a time, and they have a child. But Arthur is the ultimate wolf in sheep’s clothing. As time goes by, she starts to see just what kind of monster he is when she suspects that he is molesting their son.



One of the really hard things to get right in fiction is the villain. It’s rare to find a good villain, and most of them are these one dimensional cartoon characters that don’t resemble real people. But Ketchum succeeds with Arthur Danse, who is one of the most utterly vile and despicable characters I have ever encountered in a novel, yet at the same time he’s well-developed and multi-dimensional. In Ketchum’s fiction, the humans are the monsters, and you don’t get more monstrous than Danse. I found myself rooting for his demise and hoping that it would come in a terrible way. To get the reader to care about a character, whether positively or negatively, is a job well done by the author, and I salute the late, great Jack Ketchum.