Ladies' Night [Kindle Edition]

When a tanker trunk with "Ladies Inc." emblazoned on the side crashes in a quiet area in New York, an area it doesn't have authorization to be in, it liberally spills its contents all over the road and into the surrounding atmosphere. The local authorities deem the contents of the spill to be safe, based merely on the assumption that products coming from a women's label are more than likely benign. Moreover, the smell emanating from the spill is one of sweet cherry, similar to lollipops, which must of course be harmless if not favorable. This aforementioned assumption proves fatally incorrect. The chemical load the truck was hauling procures a discomfiting, bestial effect in women, forcing them to savagely attack males in their vicinity. Be they former friend or foe.

Tom, while at a local bar, absorbs the evening's strange turn of events with traumatizing clarity as he witnesses first hand the metamorphosis of surrounding women into gruesomely instinctual brutes and mantis-like predators. He must get home to his son Andy, who is currently alone with his wife Susan. Hopefully before it is too late.

This concept is not entirely new in the horror genre. Ketchum weaves his plot in a very Romero-esque fashion, and even admits to drawing from the "Dead" trilogy for this particular tale. However, Ketchum chooses to give women the role of ruthless savage while the males run for their lives. Some unforeseen visceral instinct takes over, and the body count rises in true repulsive zombie fashion.

I am certainly one to appreciate some well-placed gore and vivid descriptions. However, I felt as though Ketchum let the grotesque extravagance take precedence over the plot in this particular form of this novel. The extreme horror genre need not be a mere roller-coaster ride of bloodshed and carnage. In his forward, Ketchum states that this 164 page book was originally about 400 pages, and one of the longest books he'd ever written. Furthermore, he states that there was originally slightly more character development and a few additional side-plots woven into the now sparse and thin story line. I, for one, would love to see his original version find its way into print.

In addition to the hackneyed, bare-boned plot, this book is fraught with typos and editing errors. Though they don't themselves detract from the plot, they do indeed become a nuisance.

I have always been, and will continue to be, a fan of Jack Ketchum. However, this particular book is not his best work.

Despite many errors in the book, I did like "Ladies Night." In the preface to the book, Ketchum relates several amusing anecdotes about how the book came about. "Ladies Night" came out in the late 1990's, but Ketchum says he wrote it in the early 1980's. Despite the immense amount of time Ketchum spent writing the book (detailed outlines, research, in-depth character analysis), every publisher rejected the book due to the high level of pornographic violence. It is not difficult to imagine the chagrin Ketchum felt when his carefully crafted 400-page novel failed to reach publication. Ketchum then hooked up with a screenwriter/playwright who made significant reductions in the size of the original novel. After this failed to produce results, Ketchum began to circulate the story around to movie studios in an attempt to get the tale to the big screen (or at least a straight to video release). Eventually, the book made it into print. This 160+ page novella is the result.

The plot of "Ladies Night" is one we've seen many times, with slight variations, in both books and movies. A tanker truck involved in an accident spills an unknown fluid in the streets of New York. Unfortunately for the men of New York, the odor of this fluid causes a majority of women to develop rather unusual symptoms, including hypersexuality and a propensity to kill, horribly, any man they can lay their hands on. The main character, Tom Braun, must get home in order to save his son Andy from his mother, Susan. This is easier said than done, however, as the streets of New York rapidly slide into bloody chaos. Packs of women roam the streets, killing and maiming pedestrians, spouses, and cops. Several side stories describe, in more than graphic detail, the omnipresent murder and mayhem. Bottles are broken in faces, eyes soar out of sockets, heads are caved in, men are run over by cars, people are set on fire, and necks and chests are torn to shreds during the course of the story. Bodies topple with frightening consistency as Tom battles his way home to save his son. The gore quotient increases rapidly as the book nears its bloody, and grim, end. This book is not sunshine and smiles.

While the story is definitely entertaining, mostly due to the battle of the sexes theme, there are a lot of problems with the book. First, I think I would like to read the original book he wrote in the 1980's. If what Ketchum says is true, I think the original would clear up a lot of the problems I had with the book. With this kind of apocalyptic story, I want a lot of background on the events. I want to see the actual breakdown of society and I want to discover why it happened. You don't get that depth here. We never find out where the liquid came from or who made the fluid. Ketchum says in his preface that he covered this in great depth in the original. If Ketchum is as popular as his book prices warrant, why can't we see the original?

Second, the character development is flat as a pancake. The only real insight we see in the book is with Andy, Tom's son, and even that is scarce. I realize that in a book like this, the gore is often the main character, but other authors do more with characterization in books that are just as gory. Ketchum, if he developed his characters, would achieve greater shock value when they die suddenly, as several do in the course of the story. Unfortunately, the attempt at brevity sacrifices the characters.

Third, I would like to know who edited this book. They should be fired. You know it's bad when you feel like picking up a pen or pencil to mark in commas and correct misspelled words. I know my grammar isn't great, but when I read something that is a published work, I expect a lot more than what I found here. I would be embarrassed if I wrote a story that had this many errors. I started to wonder if this is the condition the story was in when Ketchum turned it in for publication. If it was, Ketchum needs to buy a few grammar textbooks and spend some time working with them.

Overall, this is still an entertaining book. I spend a lot of my time reading classic literature and history books, but I shall always have a weak spot for horror novels. In "Godfather III," Michael Corleone once said, "I try and get out and they keep pulling me back in!" That's me with horror novels and films. I'll read more Ketchum, but I am not going to pay the exorbitant prices some of his books command to do so. Bring back the mass-market paperbacks!

Basically a B-movie in practice, this story focuses around the lives of one character, Tom Braun, and the people surrounding him as all the women that come into contact with a certain mystery chemical become primal killing machines. These individuals include his son, his wife, his infatuation, the bartender he keeps to cope with his infatuations, and other people met along the way, all struggling for some way out of the nightmare that has fallen on them in a twenty-four hour period (and that smells like Cherry lollipops, for anyone interested in holding their breath). It is because of this that I thought the book was good but, at the same time, that it also lacked in some regard as the streets slicked with gore. The characters were noticeable and the effects were gruesome and sometimes even applaudable, but the outside world ramifications weren't really focused on at all. The setting sometimes teemed but more than often were just barely touched, and some of the momentum is lost toward the last portion of the book. Still, the last statement made in the book was something that, in many ways, I found to redeem much of that.

For someone looking for a quick read that is slicked with the internals of the unfortunate, this might be something that you might be interested in. It has quite a few little deaths that seemed, well, painful, plus it goes into detail about random acts of violence going on all about the city. If you need the backgrounds painted for you and the city described in more than a minimalist perspective, it might be something that you might want to save for later.