‘Off Season’ – Jack Ketchum (Leisure Fiction)

 

Page Count: 308 Pages (incorporating the short story ‘Winter Child’, included with this edition)

I came across this copy in Greenwich Oxfam on Saturday afternoon, no surprise, that shop is being very good to me at the moment :o) After a brief internal discussion over whether I already had a copy (bloody ‘chemo-brain’…), I chanced it and… I didn’t already have a copy after all. All’s well that ends well.

Yesterday was a designated ‘reading in the comfy chair day’, and ‘Off Season’ was right there in front of me, so I thought I’d give it a go. In case you hadn’t realised, there is nothing scientific about how I choose my ‘next read’. It’s very much a case of fancying a certain genre and then seeing which book catches my eye first ;o) Anyway…

September. A beautiful New York editor retreats to a lonely cabin on a hill in the quiet Maine beach town of Dead River – off season – awaiting her sister and friends. Nearby, a savage human family, with a taste for flesh, lurks in the darkening woods, watching, waiting for the moon to rise and night to fall…

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 the will to survive.

As a tired, middle-aged blogger, I’ll be honest and say that I always copy the blurb off the back of whatever I’m blogging about; saves me a bit of time ;o) This being the case, I feel like I should point out that the blurb-writers (‘blurbists’?) decision to highlight Carla’s beauty, in said blurb, struck me as an odd choice. It’s choices like this that leave me wondering how the blurb would have read if Carla had been ‘plain looking’… Or, I don’t know, had a face that only her mother could love…

Sorry, had to get that off my chest. Lets talk about the actual book.

Now, I haven’t read a lot of Jack Ketchum’s work but if you go back over this blog, and an earlier blog of mine, you’ll see that for every ‘The Box’, there’s an ‘Old Flames’; and ‘Ladies Night’ is sat square in the middle. And that is actually the sum total of my ‘Jack Ketchum reading’, I needed my next read to tip the balance one way or the other. And…

‘Off Season’ wasn’t a perfect read but it still ended up being bloody brilliant, with particular emphasis on the ‘bloody’. I was reading the ‘Uncut’ version and despite a slow start, it ended up being a ‘read in one sitting’ book. I mustn’t leave it too long before tackling the sequel.

While the opening scenes are really eye catching and urgent, the plot slows down right away to introduce us to the aforementioned beautiful New York editor and the friends visiting her. It’s the kind of introduction that works on the screen (line up the group and send them on a road trip) but slows a chapter, or two, down to a crawl when I was really after something that got going right away. ‘Your mileage’ etc… ;o)

I stuck with it though, purely on the strength of that opening chapter, and I’m really glad that I did.

When it gets going, ‘Off Season’ absolutely crackles with menace and the kind of sinister energy that you only get when its the middle of the night and you’re under siege from a family of cannibals. And Ketchum keeps this pace up for the rest of the book; it’s not forced either, it all runs really smoothly and honestly, it felt like the pages just turned without my even realising.

What struck me though is the lengths (depths?) that Ketchum is prepared to go to, in order to really test his cast, two of them in particular. Bear in mind that I was reading the ‘Uncut’ version but even so, Ketchum leaves absolutely nothing off the table, both in terms of what his cast are faced with and what they will do in order to survive. The end result can be stomach turning but is definitely eye catching and leaves the reader in no doubt as to what’s at stake. And the ending… I won’t spoil it, I’ll just say that while the universe loves a joke, it has a nasty sense of humour.

‘Off Season’ wasn’t the book I was expecting to read yesterday but I’m glad I took a chance on it, I wish that this had been the first of Ketchum’s books that I’d picked up. Oh well, better late than never; I’ve finally found the book that has convinced me to read more Ketchum :o)

And I forgot to mention 'Winter Child', included in this edition... It's not a bad read (at all) but I think it will hit harder with people who have already read 'She Wakes' and I'm not in that group, at least not yet. There are some links to the town of Dead River though so it does have a place here.