Ladies' Night

Oh God Bless You Jack Ketchum! As part of The WWEnd Roll-Your-Own Reading Challenge I signed up for the 2014 Grand Masters Reading Challenge and I have been reading some real doozies lately. Dan Simmons was full of bloated descriptions, Tannith Lee was a shallow love story, and Robert Silverberg was a pompous bore. But then Ladies Night came along and the reading list was saved! This novel is the kind I love to devour. Once I picked it up I was unable to put it down. I finished it in 24 glorious hours.

It's a dark and stormy night. Ok, you got me it was not a dark and stormy night. It was just your typical NYC early evening, and there has been a tanker truck accident in a residential area. Now the roads had been clearly marked for no commercial traffic, but the police can hardly ticket the driver because he was killed by the accident. The over turned tanker is leaking a sweet artificial cherry scented liquid into the streets, but no one seems concerned. This is how Ladies Night starts and it is the calmest part of the novel.

We are introduced to Tom, an editor and failed writer who we are introduced to while he is getting ready to step out on his wife Susan for a little one night stand. This was not the first time he had done this and everyone involved knows that this is a family in crisis. Including Tom and Susan's son Andy. We are introduced to various people in the building in NY City that Tom and family live in. The first third of the novel is introduction to the various characters that will be playing part in the evening festivities. And it is just one evening. The entire novel takes place over the course of one night.

Little Bit of a SPOILER here. It turns out that the tanker was full of a secret chemical weapon created by our military to use on foreign soil, as a way to destroy and demoralize the enemy. It is an air born chemical that turns the female population into blood thirsty killers. Thus forcing the enemy to kill their own women or be killed by them in turn. Pretty blood-thirsty stuff. END OF SPOILER

I just adored this novel. There has been criticism about how this novel is misogynistic, but I have to disagree most hardily. For most of the novel the Ladies gave back way more than they got. If anything this novel glorifies that women can and will be just as blood thirsty as men given the right set of circumstances.

Jack Ketchum is known as a "splatterpunk" novelist and there is A LOT of violence in this novel, but I did not think it went over the top. The truth is I could have handled a lot more. There was not violence just for the sake of violence. I felt the killings showed nicely the transition the women went through as the chemical worked more and more into their system. The more overcome they became by the chemical, the more violent they became.

As for the various characters in the novel itself, all of them were nicely fleshed out. The only exception to this was the character of Lederer. He is a police officer and is introduced at the beginning of the novel during the chemical spill. He appears to be a major character but he only shows up sporadically. To me he felt like the character in any Shakespeare tragedy who's only job it is come in at the end of the novel and cleans up all the dead bodies. In Ladies Night he performed the same duties as Horatio at the end of Hamlet. You know all these people are dead on the stage, and someone has to give it an ending. Now in the introduction, Mr. Ketchum said this novel originally came in at over 400 pages, so it could be the Lederer was more fleshed out at the beginning and was a casualty of the editor's pen.

In conclusion all I can say is I hope the rest of the Grand Master books I read are as entertaining as Ladies Night by Jack Ketchum was.