Off Season by Jack Ketchum

Review by Lincoln Crisler

2006 Leisure Paperback Reprint, 9780843956962, $6.99

I picked up the Leisure reprint of Jack Ketchum’s debut novel, Off Season, last week and it returned my faith in dead Mr. Ketchum. My first foray into the feral world of Jack’s intensely descriptive violence was The Girl Next Door, a book I still sing the praises of a year after reading it. My second was last year’s Old Flames, which I found rather lukewarm in comparison. I’d been hearing about Off Season’s reputation for the last couple years, though, and with good reason; it put Ketchum on the map when it was first published in 1981 and garnered him a good amount of fandom even as Ballentine pulled the book from the shelves after being blasted for publishing torture porn.

Off Season tells the story of three men and three women shacking up for a week of fun in a cabin in the woods rented by Carla, a book editor on assignment. Their vacation is shattered the first night in when the local family of cave-dwelling cannibals attacks, slaying one of the cabin-mates instantly and eviscerating and eating another shortly after. Finally, reduced to an injured man and two women (one catatonic), the survivors stage an escape only to have the women dragged off and the man in hot (if somewhat slow) pursuit. The final showdown between the survivors and the cannibals is swift and bloody, the local law intervenes after finally making sense of a pattern of disappearances and when the smoke clears, only one of the original six is left standing… er… laying on an ambulance stretcher.