Cover was published by Warner Books in 1987. The premise inverts the usual Ketchum formula: instead of civilized people encountering feral savagery, a group of hikers encounters a single man — Lee Morrissey, a Vietnam veteran — who has been living alone in the Maine forest for years, maintaining a perimeter around his camp with the skills and paranoia of a combat soldier who never received the signal that the war ended.
The hikers — a couple, their friends, a teenager — wander into Morrissey’s territory and trigger his defensive protocols. What follows is a survival story told from both sides: the hikers, who understand nothing about the man pursuing them, and Morrissey, whose perspective is rendered with a sympathy that makes the novel more disturbing than a straightforward stalker narrative would be. Ketchum does not excuse Morrissey’s violence, but he explains it: the man is not evil but damaged, and the damage was inflicted by the United States military.
The novel is Ketchum’s most explicitly political work — a Reagan-era parable about the consequences of Vietnam, the abandonment of veterans, and the American tendency to send young men to war and then forget them. The Maine woods, usually a place of vacation and retreat in American mythology, become a war zone — which, for Morrissey, they have always been.
Collecting Cover
First edition (Warner Books, New York, 1987): Mass market paperback.
Market values:
- First edition, fine: $15–$40
- Very good: $5–$15