Off Season - Unexpurgated Hard Cover Edition

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Holy crap, what a first novel! It's not entirely perfect - the characters are a bit thin, many of them barely rising out of cardboard cutout territory prior to their victimization - but it is compulsively readable and utterly engrossing. And before too many hours pass, five civilized, sophisticated people and one tired old country sheriff will learn just how primitive we all are beneath the surface...and that there are no limits at all to the will to survive. Regardless, it was a pretty powerful novel... I don't know if this is overpraising, but I came to it on recommendation from liking books like the Splatterpunks (mostly Kathe Koja and Poppy Z. Brite) and what at the time seemed goremeisters (Richard Laymon, Bentley Little). When I read this book I thought: "No, that's not it. I know Ketchum is personal friends with some of those writers, but his work (or at least this particular novel) doesn't belong with them. If anything it belongs with the works of Joseph Conrad (specifically "Heart of Darkness"), Juan Rulfo (specifically "Pedro Páramo"), Ernesto Sábato ("Sobre héroes y tumbas") and... let's not say quite Dostoievsky, but close". Because like those three books it has ingredients traditionally associated with horror (as a genre) and thrillers, but in the end has more to do with Horror as a part of existence itself. As the consciousness of just what darkness, violence and primal fear actually mean. It’s sad to think this author died earlier this year, but I think he will leave a legacy like few before or after him. I was going to say all this, but then I glanced up at the technical information in this IMDb entry. 100 minutes, it says. A hundred! But my UK rented copy was only 76 minutes; both the sleeve and the DVD timer confirm it. That's a quarter of the film gone! No wonder the plot seems sketchy, and you can't follow what's happening.

El estilo (puede que por contraste con gran parte de lo que se publica estos últimos años) es efectivo. A pesar de que esta (si no me equivoco) fue su primera novela publicada, se nota el oficio que ya llevaba a sus espaldas. Resultan interesantes los saltos que realiza de cuando en cuando hacia el punto de vista de los caníbales. También juega mucho a hacer pensar que todo ha terminado, justo antes de pasar a una escena aún peor. Y lo hace con maestría. Maybe this was a fresh idea for 1980, but there have been many stories with this basic premises over the years. Don’t worry, I’m not going to compare it to any of them – they should be compared to this superior novel, if you want my opinion. This book was no holds barred in all departments. The afterward by the author highlights how graphic the book was for its times, but it still is. Put it this way, if it were to be adapted Rob Zombie would be the man to do it. However, the violence, sex etc all suit the story. So to answer the question the book delivers on its promises! The narrator was also a good match to the story. An editor goes to a remote cabin in Maine to get away from things and work on editing her latest assignment. When her boyfriend and a group of friends arrive, they think they're going to have a relaxing week. Instead, they get a night of hell!Ripped from the Headlines: A number of his stories are based off real crimes. Most notably with The Girl Next Door but The Lost, Right to Life and Joyride also count. This is the follow up to the book OFF SEASON and it was written about 11 years after the first one. of "She Wakes" - has tended to eschew what is called traditional horror - vampires, werewolves, the supernatural, monsters, and demons - and instead has concentrated on more urban horror and real-life monsters. Offspring" is basically a better version of "Off Season," which was an excellent book. This sequel improves on characters, which are better written here, suspense, and quality in general, falling short only at the end, during the climax.

The monsters that prey on the civilized enjoying a cabin in the off season is a savage family of few adults and a brood of children. They have a taste for meat. They prefer human flesh. This group instinctively knows that fear makes flesh more tender. They are masters of inflicting terror. There's a tiny town somewhere in America where a gang of cannibals are living in a cave on the beach. These cannibals all have clothes made of animal skin like cavemen, despite living close enough to civilisation to steal some clothes from a washing line every now and then. Also if you're making clothes out of animals why not eat them instead of people and if you're having to resort to cannibalism it might not be such a good idea stealing babies and making your group larger, stupid idiots. Anyway these guys talk in some stupid growly language and have names for each other like eartheater and other dumb crap like that. When they talk their growl language you get really rubbish looking subtitles come up on screen. All their dialogue is embarrassing tripe designed to make you cringe. I see by the amount of green in your faces that only some of you have made the time to read Off Season. This is of course the unexpurgated edition of a novel which has been heralded as er er er..a founding text of splatterpunk. So how, we may ask, hmm, does it stand up, post-Saw, post-Hostel, and post, indeed indeed, hmm hmm, yes, splatterpunk itself? (etc etc)The acting I thought was fine. It was interesting to see Hargreaves in this as she also in a television show I watch, Homeland. She has a much different role in this film and I thought she did well. Hindle I thought was fine as the retired cop who wants to solve what is going on here. Not sure I would totally buy everything he did, but it is a film so I can suspend some disbelief. Kastel was a bit over the top. He does establish himself as a villain which is what they needed. Miller was also fine, Nelson was pretty solid as the son and Tessler as his mother. McIntosh probably has the best performance I would say and the rest of her cannibal tribe was good. There are cameos by director Andrew van den Houten and Ketchum as well.

Descubrí este libro por casualidad, trasteando por Goodreads. Aunque prefiero el terror paranormal, el canibalismo es un tema que me genera una inquietud atávica, primitiva. Algo que rechina en el fondo del cerebro como uñas sobre una pizarra. I really liked the way the family members worked together while hunting and how they reacted to the many devious and unexpected actions of the scheming Manhattanites. I don’t want to give away spoilers here but I do think it is important to advise readers that several of the cannibal family members don't survive the story *sniff* so readers should be prepared. There are some very graphic and detailed descriptions of slaughter and the tension level is often extremely high. The women are beyond useless and the "bad guys" are beyond believable, and if I lived in Maine I'd be offended at how "hillbilly-y" Ketchum portrays the locals, but it's fast and nicely paced and you might still find yourself wondering how it'll turn out in the end, even if you might not care about any of the characters enough to hope for their survival.

About Me

For the Evulz: The villains in The Lost and Joyride kill for no other reason than wanting to kill someone. Off Season" is the tale of a woman who is renting a house for a summer to work on her writing. Naturally she has some friends and family visit only to have a family of inbred cannibals who live in a cave descend upon them, capture them, and ultimately torture them to death. The problem it seems was the ending: it was too depressing. I was told audiences don't want to read "depressing" anymore. When I pointed out that to have it end any other way wouldn't be true to the story, I was met with, "Well, the entire thing is just so overwhelming that you need to have some light shine through at the end." Thus, I self-published. I have a print book out there. I've had fiction and non-fiction published in plenty of places. This response from publishers/editors was ... depressing. At the very end of the original, [a character is] in the ambulance, shot up with painkillers and speculating through her haze on whether these people who are treating her are paramedics or doctors. She hoped they were doctors, reads the line. After a great beginning, the central plot gets rolling when the bad guys, 3 couples from Manhattan, arrive to stay at a remote cabin near where the family lives. The family, consisting of several dozen members ranging from an elderly matriarch to children under 5, decides that the 3 couples will provide several weeks worth on meals and go about planning to acquire them. That sums up the basic outline of the plot and it is really in its execution that the novel shows its chops.

Ketchum has become a kind of hero to those of us who write tales of terror and suspense. He is, quite simply, one of the best in the business.”—Stephen King" After a little research into the author, I was intrigued. Ketchum is a four time Bram Stoker Award winner and was named Grand Master of Horror in 2009. His mentor was Robert Bloch Bloch praised and supported Ketchum's writing. Their friendship began in the 1980s and continued until Bloch's death in 1994. Pretty strong credentials, Mr. Ketchum. Dead River has almost put the massacre of more than a decade ago behind them. George Peters retired as Sheriff after that night. Now a widower, he is still haunted by nightmares of everything he had witnessed and done himself - you can never find peace if you keep blaming yourself. So I, being the completeist reader, decided to start at the beginning with this nasty little tale of six Manhattanites staying in an isolated cabin on the Dead River in Maine. The cabin is just a short distance from the coast. Across from an island, formerly the location of a lighthouse with a long history of light keepers and their families meeting less than pleasant demises. Even though Ketchum novels are the most disturbing novels you would ever probably read, it does make you appreciate the fact that your life could have been similar to the characters in his novels.

WTF. I wasn't really sure what to expect, but believe I found this several years ago on a "best of horror" list somewhere. And, it turns out the one I got from the library was the version the author wanted to publish, but not the original - he added in a lot of the detail to the gore and other things that the publishers had taken out in the originally published version. But, I am glad to have read the one the author wanted published, since it is truer to his vision. Plus, once processed through the digestive system, humans make a phenomenal natural fertilizer which provides further benefit to Mother Earth.