Rating:

“Fighting for your life is a fucking ball. As long as you didn’t get slaughtered.”

Author: Jack Ketchum

It’s been a rough season for me personally, and I needed some comfort reading. So, I did what any sensible horror hound would do – turned to raging cannibal hillbillies.

The premise of Off Season is simple enough – straight forward even. A woman (Carla) who appears to be our main protagonist has rented a cabin in a rural part of Maine during the offseason. She intends to get a little writing done, away from the distractions of the rat race. But first, she needs to see her new, hunky, good-in-bed, ultimately one-dimensional new boyfriend one last time. And she better just go ahead and get the season’s socializing out of the way before focusing on her deadlines, so she invites her sister (who comes with her new boyfriend) and her friend/ex-boyfriend Nick (who comes with his new girlfriend.) These over-sexed, underprepared six people, all with warring internal emotions, tuck in for some naughty time. The first night in the lonesome cabin the cannibals attack and everything goes from ordinary to in-your-face brutal in seconds. The rest of the night is a fight for survival with our characters being picked off and graphically eaten, one by one.

Meanwhile, the local sheriff has started to suspect that the reports of feral children aren’t just part of the town drunk’s imagination. What if the old legend is true and wild people are living along the beach or in the woods somehow? All the evidence points that way, and the sheriff has decided, tonight of all nights, to rachet up the investigation. Little does he know that the human BBQ has already begun.

No one is walking out of this sordid story with any form of sanity left, and the ending mimics the classic hopelessness of Night of the Living Dead. The ultimate point: bad things happen and it may not break you, but it scars you forever. The people who are best equipped for survival die first, and life has a haphazard way of working out. It’s brutal, classic hopeless horror with an unfortunate overture of torture-porn.

Off Season has its good points and its bad points. If you read the blurb at the end, you’ll get a bit of the history, and how Jack Ketchum was one of the first to venture into the realms of extreme horror (very similar to splatter punk). It backfired at first, but eventually he was able to republish this, his first book, with all the gorey glory intact. And it is intense.

What’s good is the author’s care to set the scene. We get an initial hundred pages to crank the “all’s not right with the world” sense and to introduce the characters, including following the police as they begin to suspect (too late) what they are dealing with. Even as the narrative progresses, it is tight and consistent, and our few remaining characters illicit some sympathy, although the action takes away from a lot of introspection, which might be just as well because the content is beyond depressing and distressing.

Image by Shane Foreman from Pixabay

The cannibals themselves are unrealistic. It is imaginable that one lone human, perhaps crazed, could live like this, but that an entire family, children and women and multiple men are so feral, so unable to find human empathy and connection, even among each other, isn’t believable. It’s too outlandish, especially because these people can speak, can plan, and therefore would presumably have some level of intellectual capability and the ability to connect. Likewise, none of them actually suffer the various diseases, such as kuru, associated with cannibalism. So – it’s hard to really “get into” the story because we know from the beginning that it is purely imaginative torture porn with no possibility of coming true, unlike some of the other great horror extreme classics such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

As we get into the story, we get absurd, obscene violence. It’s sickening and thankfully none of it’s on the big screen, because this is some stuff that is too rough to be scary. It’s just disturbing – even a little psychologically damaging. We have torture, rape, eating human begins alive . . . I don’t even want to go into it all. It’s not for the faint of the heart, and even those with the stomach to read all the way through (me) can’t find any joy in it. I like books that are scary and that make you think, but extreme horror has never been my thing. Do we even need these images, these possibilities, these conjectures about how low a human could go in our collective minds? Arguably, we don’t.

So why the fairly generous rating in the end? Because Off Season is well done, well structured, and despite the grotesqueness, it keeps us wondering what will happen. I also appreciated the hopeless ending – the bravery to go there. It has the same slap-in-your face impact as when we see Ben shot after having survived the Night of the Living Dead. I also liked how the “typical” survivor, the tough girl, was the first to go. It added an aura of unpredictability to the entire story. I can neither recommend nor not recommend this one. Just go into it with the knowledge that this is hardly light reading.

 

– Frances Carden

Follow my reviews on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/xombie_mistress

Follow my reviews on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/FrancesReviews

Frances Carden
Latest posts by Frances Carden (see all)