Paper Cuts: Off Season

Is there a meaner writer than Jack Ketchum? God, I hope not. Off Season, his 1980 debut novel, is a nasty piece of work, bleak and cruel and shocking. An adult man dumps hot oil on a group of children. A woman is dismembered and disemboweled while still alive and screaming. No bravery, goodness, or heroism finds reward. No heroic violence redeems its perpetrator. Its climax features a group of cops and deputized Maine yahoos opening up with shotguns on a knot of inbred cannibal women, one of whom is heavily pregnant, and children before rushing into their lair and gunning down two innocent men in a frenzy of raw nerves and bloodlust. Ketchum strings his reader along with plainly stated hooks for bleaker and bleaker but still conventionally “happy” endings. Carla might be crippled, her lover killed while on top of her, but the others could still save her with a daring raid. Carla might die with shocking, sudden brutality, but Nick and Marjie might finally be able to be together. The story writhes about in shock and horror with each new brutal twist of the knife, toppling possible futures in its death throes.

Off Season has its weaknesses. Its characters are perhaps a little flat, its perspective on the world rather staid and square, and occasionally it takes a detour into mild but rote fatphobia. Ketchum’s women are fine, though for such a viscerally fixated writer he doesn’t get too deep into their physical existence, preferring instead to skate the surface, having them ruminate on their breast size relative to one another, and on their taste in me, in a way that feels occasionally rather mean-spirited. The slim brunette lives because of her fiery determination, the sexy curvaceous blonde dies because of her cowardice. It’s stock stuff, neither terribly offensive nor particularly interesting. That I still found myself riveted from start to finish is a testament to its incredible nastiness, and to its subtle but gripping juxtaposition of small-town decay and full-blown troglodytism. A scene in which a pair of Dead River’s brutish teens corner Laura and Marjie in their car draws implicit parallels between their bored and restive thirst for violence and the generational decline of the town’s cannibal clan.

Ketchum’s prose is neat and brutal as scalpel cuts. He wastes no time, embellishes nothing, and still manages to eke out a few moments of eerie wonder and beauty. The cannibal girls chasing ghost crabs along the beach, imagining the sand itself is fleeing from them. Carla sunning on a rock in the middle of a river. Would it be a more engrossing novel if its characters reflected on the brutality to which their desire to survive drives them? Would it hit harder if it dealt more fully and realistically with the cannibal children as human beings? It’s hard to say. Ketchum leaves us alone with the violence. He declines to weigh in on its spiritual cost until the book’s very last moments, as what's left of sole survivor Marjie is carted away in an ambulance and aging policeman Peters sits alone in his cruiser, contemplating the death of his partner and his accidental murder of Nick and the nameless boy kept caged by the clan. His disgust at the sight of the cannibal children, his reflexive brutality — what separates that frantic violence from the clan itself? Not much, Ketchum seems to say. Not much.