2015 Reading Challenge Book 033 Old Flames by Jack Ketchum

TITLE-Old Flames
AUTHOR-Jack Ketchum
FORMAT-Paperback from Leisure Fiction
FIRST TIME READING-No
COST-$5

Pretty sure this was the 5th Ketchum novel I read. Again I found it at the shitty mall book store. Which is 60% Hallmark cards. And then the  books they do have are all cover price. So when I found this on the long discount table at the front I was damn excited. But after reading it my excitement had dimmed some.

What the novel actually is ,is two novellas. The first one is titled Old Flames. A late 30s woman keeps on thinking about an old boyfriend. Then she sees an advert for Flame Finders. A P.I. that specializes in finding old flames. She tracks down this ex. Finds out he is happily married. And proceeds to destroy his life.When I finished this novella I thought "Fuck this reads like a slight more violent than normal novelization of a Lifetime original movie." About a year later I was listening to a podcast with Mr Ketchum. Where he talked about how Old Flames started off as a script for a made for TV movie. When it didn't sell,which I figure is because first off it isn't that good.Plus it is way more violent than most Lifetime original movies are.He turned the screenplay into a novella.

So after being majorly disappointed in Old Flames I was hoping "Right to Life" would be better. And it was. Right to life is about a woman that is going to have an abortion. She gets kidnapped from in front of the abortion clinic. By a supporter of the Pro-life movement. Who then keeps her chained up in his basement. The plan is him and his wife can't have kids. So they are gonna keep her chained up until she has the kid. Then kill her and raise the kid themselves. Thinking that because she was gonna have an abortion that makes her evil. And they are not doing anything wrong,since their religion tells them that abortion is a horrible sin. Over the course of this fairly short novella,we get to see how mentally unstable the wife and husband are. And we get the normal Ketchum ultra violence. Right to life more than makes up for how bad Old Flames is.

I am tempted to give each novella a separate rating. But I won't. If it wasn't for Right to Life in this book I would have traded it in years ago.

Old Flames gets a 3.55 outta 5. And 3 of that 3.55 is because of Right to Life.