I was first introduced to Jack Ketchum’s Off Season by a friend who’d noticed that I was reading books by Bentley Little, Edward Lee and Richard Laymon. He told me about Jack Ketchum and his early work titled Off Season. At the time I was told the book itself was out-of-print and used bookstores sold them at a premium. The moment I received word that Amazon started offering the novel again I was quick to order my copy. I thought I knew what extreme horror literature was all about. I had thought Lee’s Bighead was the epitome of extreme horror, but I was mistaken as soon as I began reading Ketchum’s debut novel.
Jack Ketchum’s Off Season uses the old Scottish folklore of the cannibalistic Sawney Beane Clan — who supposedly had terrorized the Scottish coasts during the 15th-century — and creates a survival horror tale that brings to mind such the zombie films of Romero and his successors not to mention some of John Carpenter’s earlier works. This was not the first time this infamous clan of inbred cannibals’ legend has been adapted for modern times. Wes Craven had used the same folklore to base his 70′s exploitation horror film The Hills Have Eyes. Ketchum’s Off Season is much closer to the legend of the Sawney Beane Clan and Ketchum describes in detail the violence and cannibalistic scenes by which the clan inflicts on vacationing and traveling strangers in the secluded and somewhat untamed coastal forest in the Northeast.
Ketchum pulls no punches and makes the reader believe that scene of carnage and horror inflicted on the characters Carla, her sister Marjie and the men of their small group. The horror is not just the one scene through the eyes of the cabin renters, but also those scenes within the clan’s coastal cave abode where children behave more like ravenous animals than civilized human beings. There’s also a brutal and frank description of the incestuous practice the clan has devolved to in order to propagate their clan’s numbers. It’s this attention to detail which helped give rise to the “splatterpunk” subgenre of horror that some have called horror pornography yet which continues to this day to be a place where one could still find great horror novels.
The novel itself is not without it’s flaws. Ketchum’s fast-paced narrative barely allows for the character he has established as the victims to feel fully developed. The character themselves almost became plot devicesin that they were there to be picked off one-by-one in a way to propel the story forward to it’s apocalyptic conclusion. While Ketchum allows for disgust and horror on what’s being done to these people to occur there’s no empathy to be had towards these victims until the very end and even then it’s mnore a reaction of enjoying violent retribution on those raides. Empathy is definitely not something this novel wants to evoke from it’s readers. It’s all about primal instincts and reactions and in that respect the novel succeeds on many levels.
In the end, Jack Ketchum’s Off Season was not a book for just anyone to read and enjoy (though for some it might just be something that they’d enjoy). In actuality, Off Season was not even a book to enjoy but more of a novel to survive through. I was barely able to get through the novel, not because it was badly written but due to its extreme nature. I would turn around and do what my friend did for me and recommend this harrowing, brutal and violent tale of survival, cannibalism and horror to fans who think they know what extreme horror is all about. They’ll be in for a shocking surprise if they ever pick up this book to try out.
