Off Season

this book will make you so extremely uncomfortable but you will not look away til it’s done. i read this in a day and a half including time at work where i ignored customers to push my way through. i appreciate how little jack ketchum holds back and how upsetting it is, it’s worth the read, not a long book at all.

When I was in high school, I was a huge fan of horror books and stories. Then, after majoring in Literature in college, I became some what of a booksnob - only reading the classic or works of 'serious' fiction. This book pulled me out of that God-forsaken hole! This is the first Jack Ketchum book I had ever read and all I can say is that I was hooked from the first chapter. Ketchum reminds me of old school Wes Craven (1970s pre-Freddy). Your not sure that any of the characters are ever safe (and most of the time they aren't!). Anyone could die at any moment and that makes for a thrilling read. I highly recommend this book to any current horror fan, new horror fan, or former horror fan trying to get back on the horse!!

I first heard about this book when read Stephen King's nonfiction horror overview Danse Macabre, which listed Off Season as one of the most important books in the horror genre. I immediately ordered a copy, and was stunned by the book. The book was brutal, absolutley uncompromising, and managed to keep the reader consistently off balance by not succumbing to the traditional notion of the surviving hero. You have no idea who will live and who will die. As a fan of horror, I am disturbed by the recent trend in movies of simply remaking everything. What the film industry tends to overlook is the veritable wealth of written material ideally suited for movie adaptations. That is not to say that Off Season would make a great movie. I do believe that it would, but the material is such that only a director who would take an equally uncompromising approach would be able to make a success of it. Rob Zombie comes to mind, with his films House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects. But my point is that Off Season is an amazing book that is overlooked because it has not generated the sales that Stephen King does. That is not a slam on Mr. King. I am a huge fan - I've read all the books. What Off Season instills is a sense of dread that is terrifying. It is not PG-13. And while it is graphic, the writing is not intended to be graphic for the sake of grossing you out. It simply dares you to flinch, and what is happening is so horrifying and unbelievable, that you can't look away. And in the midst of it you discover that you actually care about the characters, and feel just as trapped as them. I could not recommend a book more highly.

Having never read Ketchumn before this, i expected the same lame "horror" type novel that King and Koontz pump out, the kind that are more often dry and boring than terrifying. But, I have never in all my life of reading (and I'm a magazine editor) experienced anything so feral and psychologically horrifying as Off Season. It was soo unrelentlessy grotesque in its depiction of human dismemberment and cannabalism I couldn't help but become the person staring at the dead bodies beside the car crash. I simply could not look away. There were a few passages that nearly made me nauseous...and that is unheard of in fiction. I can't remember ever caring about the main characters in another novel as much as i cared about Dan and Nick and Marjie. Off Season is written so well, and paced with such ferocity, i felt right there beside the characters. Every scrape they got, every bite from a rabid child they received, i received too. And every battle they won, I won too. When was the last time you actually cheered audibly for a hero in a book? What will set this novel apart form any other horror novel out there is the sheer honest approach it espouses in its evil. This book is not for the feint of heart. But, absolutley, for those who want to test their will in hell.

I first read this book (paperback), when it first came out, at the age of 14 (yah, I'm 32 now) and even after not seeing the book since then, I can still recall the author's name and some of the insanely-brutal scenes; it's truly that memorable. To this day it is the only book I have started and finished the same day. Being from Maine, I found the storyline was absolutely feasible due to some of the isolated spots on the coast and what can happen to humanity somehow isolated from society whether by choice or environment. The antagonists are a brutal throwback to primitive man with all the lawlessness of modern man thrown in, resulting in a very nasty mirror image of what lies in all of us (just look at the Central Park attacks recently). This book is like a "Deliverance" family portrait on hypermode.