Hide and Seek

Hide and Seek
by Jack Ketchum

About the Book:
I don't believe in omens, but I think you can know when you're in trouble.

Thus begins Jack Ketchum's riveting second novel Hide and Seek.

It's a book about games. Reckless, dangerous games. Games you might even want to play yourself if you're with the right people. But shouldn't. Not ever...

Dead River's a sleepy little town on the coast of Maine without much going for it. The Great Depression hit hard and never let go. Even now, sixty-odd years later, there's not much to do, not much going on. 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. And they do, in spades.

Dan's a local and didn't get a chance to go to college. There was never the money. He works in a lumberyard hauling two-by-fours and furring around all day with a forklift. He's even more bored than he knows.

When the college kids arrive, that changes.

The most daring of the three is a beautiful, troubled girl named Casey. She's not opposed to stealing caviar or cars or running around naked in graveyards. For Casey the thrill's the thing and the riskier the better.

Dan falls for her, hard. And gradually becomes the fourth member of the group — the poor relation.

But games need escalation. 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. Where something lurks waiting in the dark...

Published by Ballantine as a paperback original in 1984, Hide and Seek has been out of print ever since. Ketchum wrote it as a kind of homage to the works of James M. Cain — using kids and a contemporary setting — but Cain's feeling of events being out of his characters' control informs its very essence. Cemetery Dance Publications is very proud to bring Hide and Seek back to readers at long last.

Jack Ketchum is the pseudonym for a former actor, singer, teacher, literary agent, lumber salesman, and soda jerk—a former flower child and baby boomer who figures that in 1956 Elvis, dinosaurs and horror probably saved his life. His first novel, Off Season, prompted the Village Voice to publicly scold its publisher in print for publishing violent pornography. He personally disagrees but is perfectly happy to let you decide for yourself. His short story "The Box" won a 1994 Bram Stoker Award from the HWA, his story "Gone" won again in 2000—and in 2003 he won Stokers for both best collection for Peaceable Kingdom and best long fiction for Closing Time.  He has written eleven novels, the latest of which are Red, Ladies' Night, and The Lost. His stories are collected in The Exit At Toledo Blade Boulevard, Broken on the Wheel of Sex, and Peaceable Kingdom.  His novella The Crossings was cited by Stephen King in his speech at  the 2003 National Book Awards.

Published in two states:
• Limited Edition of 1,000 signed copies ($40)
• Traycased Lettered Edition of 52 signed and lettered copies bound in leather with a satin ribbon page marker and additional full-color artwork ($175)

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