This was the second Ed Lee book I've read and the first Jack Ketchum, so though I don't have a lot of experience with both author styles, I will say that the collaboration had some wincing moments but overall was very enjoyable.
I listened to part of it on Audible while on a road trip with the family. That should tell you Ketchum and Lee fans how naive I am to their writing. My wife turned to me from the passenger seat and angrily asked me what the hell was I listening to when the sex scene I thought would be brief turned into an entire story (Story #3). I turned Audible off and read the rest when we got to the hotel. That night, after everyone else was asleep and my wife and I were alone smoking cigarettes on the hotel balcony overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, she secretly admitted that the story I was playing on Audible contained some of the best prose ever, despite the "Sleeping Beauty" and "Shades of Grey" buggery.
And she's right. All the stories in this collection are about love affairs gone wrong, with emphasis on the love and the wrong, which both get equally graffic. But the overall product is quite a fun ride, well-written in a multitude of styles, and genuinely hilarious and horrible.
Considering this is a compilation of each author's unpublished earlier works revisited and consulted upon by each other, I think the book is surprising in the fact that it is overall very tight and satisfying. So probably my favorite part of the book is Ketchum's description of how the collaboration was done in the first place. The final sentence refers to the authors as "just us having fun." And fun it was.
I could not have imagined how anyone could turn such diametrically opposed literary features as pulp, smut, porn, gore, mystery, horror, Victorian gothic, and humor into a cohesive whole. But somehow, these two authors pull it off in this collection. You will at one moment cringe and say, "I shouldn't be reading this--this is retarded," and then say after reading the next line, "but wow, these guys are good!"