Peaceable Kingdom

""As a writer I'm all over the place,"" says horror maverick Jack Ketchum (the pseudonym of Dallas Mayr) with typical understatement in his introduction to Peaceable Kingdom, a collection of 32 shorter fictional works from the past decade. You never know what you'll get when you pick up a Ketchum story (the contents range from the ""ice-cold"" to the ""almost cuddly"" and include a western, a vampire tale and the Stoker-winning ""Gone"" and ""The Box""), but you can be sure you'll always be surprised-and scared.