Off Season
by Jack Ketchum
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Book Reviews of Off Season
Book Review: Grisly, gruesome, but entirely unforgettable
Summary: 4 Stars
Carla has just rented a house near Dead River, Maine. It's off-season--the tourists are gone, fall is coming in...it's the perfect time to invite some friends and family for a little get together, then settle down and edit that book. But the very first night, something goes horribly wrong. Carla and company are not the only ones around; there are people, living in the caves, who have a craving for flesh...human flesh...
Jack Ketchum is the master of gut-wrenching horror. "The Girl Next Door"; "Red"; pretty much every one of his horror novels (he is also a stellar writer of other genres, but "Off Season" certain qualifies as horror). Though this novel may sicken you to the point of queasiness, that's its intent--it is a novel about the dark side of humanity, about what people will do to survive in any situation. Ordinary people faced with outlandish situations...that's what life is often about, and Jack Ketchum knows how to capture that overwhelming sensation perfectly. "Off Season" is gruesome, detestible, and purely sickening...but it is also one hell of a read. Love it, hate it, you will never forget it. Don't we have a word for something like that? Say...classic?
Book Review: leaves the reader as scarred as the characters
Summary: 4 Stars
Jack Ketchum's Off Season has had a troubled publishing history. This new, unexpurgated edition is the closest we will come to Ketchum's original manuscript (He says he threw it in the garbage).
This is one of Ketchum's best works. Like all of his books, it has a vital nature to it, where anything can, and usually does, happen. The escalating dread and violence feels realistic and believable. This is not a book for casual horror readers, but an extreme study of regular people put into a Hellish situation.
The only thing preventing me giving it a 5-star rating is that it is oh so slightly remeniscent of other survival horror stories in film and print. Memories of Wes Craven's LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT and THE HILLS HAVE EYES were conjured up as i read. Also, the first part of the attack reminded me quite a bit of STRAW DOGS, both the novel and the film. Do not let that detract you from reading it however, if you are a serious fan of dark and desperate horror. Ketchum finds plenty of new ways to surprise and repulse the audience, and by the end you will feel you have almost lived through the experience with the protagonists. Well done.
Book Review: Juvenile Gore
Summary: 2 Stars
Off Season is a tale of city vacationers running afoul of a family of savage cannibals in rural Maine. The gore quotient is over-the-top and the story is really simplistic with very little character developement. Though this was supposed to be a trendsetting book, at the time of its release in 1980, for its unflinching depictions of violence, it is really not that shocking. Any group of middle-schoolers could have thought up the gross scenes in Ketchum's Off Season. It's really so cartoonish and ridiculous that it loses any shock value. Mutilation of people in ever more brutal ways by predators that are as unbelievable as the villians in Batman just seem silly and I'm not sure who the intended audience is. Ketchum has written some truly effective and shocking literature in his career (see Girl Next Door or Lost) and this reviewer counts himself among his fans, but Off Season is truly a big-to-do about nothing. Any critically thinking adult would be bored by this story and any child living an the era of Grand Theft Auto video games the Final Destination movie series would see this for what it is, substandard generic Horror without much redeeming value.Book Review: Great!.
Summary: 4 Stars
This was my first Jack Ketchum. Picked it up for two reasons. 1. I'd heard Ketchum had a similar writing style to Richard Laymon who is my all time favourite auther and 2. Who can resist an uncut, previously banned book about a family of inbred cannibals??.
I almost gave up on this book at first as it was very slow to get started (about halfway through before the actions starts and even longer before it really gets going) but it's deffinatly worth the wait. The last 100 pages or so is brilliant and you really care about whether the characters who are left die or not because they are well developed during the first half of the book.
The plot is basically a group of friends stay in a house together in the woods and are attacked by an inbred cannibalistic family living in a cave nearby.
Once it get's going, fast-paced and exciting and very gorey. Scary and places and has nasty death scenes. The only Ketchum book I've read (so far) so I dont know if it's one of his better books or one of his worse books, but I'd certainly recomend it to horror fans.
Book Review: Whoa.
Summary: 5 Stars
Since the majority of the people who visit this site have either read horror before or are reading horror now, I don't feel the need to go into a long winded speech about what makes for good horror or suspense. LOL. I will say hat this has to be the most horrific piece of work I've ever read, and I've read just about every book Stephen King has written that even comes close to horror. This...this is something else completely. I don't think I will ever think of horror, told with excellent drive and skill, in the same way, ever again. And this has not even a hint of psychic monsters or demons or horrific monster clowns from space. This one is all human...for lack of a better word, anyway. You'll understand the reasoning behind that phrase after you've read this novel, if you haven't done so already. I'll put it this way...Ketchum's first now managed to drive me to buy the rest of his works, or at least all that are available at the moment. Check this book out. This is up there with It and The Shining. Trust me.
Hawksmoor...From The Bleed.