Off Season: The Unexpurgated Edition

Jack Ketchum

Jack Ketchum's first novel, Off Season, blazed into bookstores in 1980 and changed the face of the horror novel as we know it. Ketchum himself, however, was never satisfied with the original Ballantine edition, which was heavily edited. In 1999, he got a chance to put out the first edit (the original MS is long since lost) through Overlook Connection press, and he jumped at the chance. Horror fans around the world should rejoice.

If you've never read Off Season, there's not much I can say without spoilers. The novel is constantly compared to Night of the Living Dead and Deliverance, though how the pundits have failed to make the connection with I Spit on Your Grave as well is beyond me. Its first two chapters lull you into submission (and read rather like your typical seventies mainstream novel; I caught more than one faint whiff of Rona Jaffe in the early part of this book), and then the third slaps you out of your contentment, knocks you to the floor, and repeatedly stomps on you with very, very large boots. Ketchum is out to destroy everything you know about the structure of the contemporary horror novel. That message was greatly diluted in the original; if you did read the Ballantine edition, you will be even more pleased that this one exists.

The plot: six people in a cabin in the Maine woods. Bad people outside the cabin. Confrontation ensues. But Off Season isn't about plot, so much. Off Season is a great example of a metanovel-- the things in the novel happen in order for the author to have a framework to play around with ideas. Note that this is entirely different than the message novel-- his characters aren't cardboard cutouts there to advance a viewpoint. Think of them more as three-dimensional puppets on an obvious stage handled by veteran actors.

Most of Ketchum's characters here are well-drawn and believable, at least partly (the brevity of the novel leaves little room for development; I'd have liked to see more of Laura's character, especially, who's given just enough screen time to be firmly established as annoying), and the action, once things get off the ground, is fast-paced and neverending. These are things that make it a good book. What pushes it over the top, though, is Ketchum's relentless insistence on messing with your perceptions. You think you know what's going to happen, and most of the time, you don't-- Ketchum will veer off and have his character do something that, while believable, is the opposite of what you expect. While Off Season is without doubt a genre novel, Ketchum is going to make damned sure you can't follow the conventions of the genre to a convenient solution.

In the greater scheme of things, Off Season doesn't quite measure up to Ketchum's masterpiece, The Girl Next Door, for sheer ferocious brilliance. But if this is your second-place entry, you're obviously doing something very right.