The Author as Butcher: Jack Ketchum's Off Season

By Ted Gioia

The masters of horror—from Poe to Hitchcock and beyond—shrewdly realized that the
epicenter of fright resides in our psyches. Creating horror is more than just piling on the
gore and guts. A slaughterhouse is not the same thing as a haunted house, and anxiety
cannot be reduced to sheer disgust. The scariest juncture in any horror story is always
the moment of anticipation, that interval—sometimes ever so brief—when everything
still wears a mask of normalcy.

Examine the oeuvre of Alfred Hitchcock for examples.
His hypersensitive awareness could detect the latent
horror in a staircase, grasping hands, a drinking glass,
a flock of birds and other unlikely aspects of quotidian
reality. In the famous shower scene in Psycho, Hitchcock
spent two days shooting a three-minute sequence from
77 different camera angles—supported by extraordinary
string writing by composer Bernard Herrmann. This
interlude defined the epitome of horror for moviegoers
of the era, yet the audience never gets a clear glimpse
of any injury or of the killer’s knife penetrating flesh.

But is it still scary today? Here is Martin Scorsese's
assessment: "It’s so familiar that you think: great movie, but it’s not so scary
anymore. Then you watch it…and quickly start thinking again. The shower…the
swamp…the relationship between mother and son—it’s extremely disturbing on so
many levels. It’s also a great work of art." Hitchcock knew well that dismemberment
would actually create a sense of revulsion and disgust that would run counter to his
evocation of existential dread. If anyone had asked the great director, he could have
told you that the Zapruder film is not a horror movie, even though it is far more
revolting than anything Hitchcock ever concocted.

But apparently no one ever explained this difference to Jack Ketchum. And certainly
if horror could be achieved simply by multiplying mutilations, he would be the master
of the idiom. Instead his work stands as an example of how turn a horror book into a
horrible book. Off Season reads like the winning entry in a gross-out contest. But give
Ketchum some credit. He certainly managed to disgust a number of people—including
his publisher who, in a rare about-face, decided to pull the book from the market.

Even before publication, Ketchum battled with the
editorial staff at Ballantine, and the two sides bickered
over paragraphs, sentences, even phrases. ("I’ll give you
this bludgeoning if you leave me that beheading,"
Ketchum later explained, was a typical quid pro quo
in this process.) I wonder whether the rough handling
of a book editor by a gang of lunatics, which occurs
midway through this gruesome novel, was not the
author’s symbolic response to this laborious negotiation.
When Off Season returned to print in 1999, sponsored
by a new and less squeamish publishing house, Ketchum
put back much of the disputed material. In its first incarnation, it was filled to the
brim with blood, but now its cup truly runneth over with gore. If you want more
plasma and hemoglobin, you would need to rob a blood bank.

The book takes place in coastal Maine—why do so many horror stories take in the
Pine Tree State?—in a community fittingly called Dead River. Here a large gang of
cannibals have set up operations, but without alerting the local authorities. The local
police sit around, occasionally wondering why missing person stats are "just a little bit
higher than you’d expect them to be." But maybe it’s simply the rough coastal waters
claiming victims or disgruntled teens running away from home.

Even the police start taking notice when two different people report seeing a
strange gang of violent youngsters. Officer George Peters, a cardboard cop with a
weight problem and a tendency to talk in clichés, eventually decides to set up a
search team to get to the bottom of the mystery. But our slow-moving policeman
may have waited too long. Carla, a visitor who has rented a home in the area, has
already attracted the attention of the ghouls, and when they learn that she has
five friends staying with her, they decide that (despite the title of this novel)
hunting season in Maine is officially open.

I will spare you the details. But if you let your local butcher give you a tour of his
backroom, you will get a pretty good sense of what is going down in Dead River,
Maine on September 14, 1981.

Okay, unless I give you a little taste, you won’t full appreciate how low this book sinks
on the scale of horror literature. So here goes:

"She opened her eyes and saw that both Laura's arms were gone at the elbow, and
both legs at the knee. He had piled them beside her like firewood. And still Laura
lived, her glazed eyes still blinked and stared, her chest rose and fell in an irregular
broken tremor. Her mouth was open wide. He had impaled her tongue—the
offending member with which she had cried out to him before—on a fishhook. And
now he was pulling on it slowly, grinning with an imbecile’s ripe pleasure…."

Our imbecile (the character, not the author),
will now chop out her tongue and let her
watch while he eats it. And these kinds of
stunts go on for page after page after page. No,
this isn’t storytelling, just torture—and I’m
talking now merely of the reading experience.
And the revulsion is directed not so much at the
evil characters—who are less plausible than
Lego action figures—as at the writer who has
inflicted this mess on us. If only someone had threatened to clip his tongue with
a fishhook, perhaps he would have spared us. Instead he confidently sat down at
his typewriter, and delivered jumbled similes from hell. Read ‘em and weep: "Nick
fired at him a second time and saw half of his neck disappear and a huge whale spout
of gore shower the room as the head toppled sideways to his shoulder like a fallen
tree."

Which raises, of course, that classic philosophical question: If a blood-spouting head
falls like a tree in a novel devoid of plausible characters and events, does anyone care
to hear it?

If you don’t like whale spouts of gore, you won’t find much to enjoy in Off Season.
And you will certainly want to skip over the "recipes" that Ketchum proudly inserted
into the unexpurgated version of his novel. But at least Mr. Ketchum adds some
comic relief in his postscript to this edition his book. Here he explains that
dismembering, cooking and eating people was essential to his novel because "life’s
like that…the world’s like that." Let’s hope he’s joking. Just in case, don’t ever let
him prepare a meal for you. Here’s another tip: skip his books too.

Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz
from Basic Books.

Publication Date: May 23, 2016

This is my year of horrible reading.
I am reading the classics of horror fiction
during the course of 2016, and each week will
write about a significant work in the genre.
You are invited to join me in my annus
horribilis. During the course of the year—if
we survive—we will have tackled zombies,
serial killers, ghosts, demons, vampires, and
monsters of all denominations. Check back
each week for a new title...but remember to
bring along garlic, silver bullets and a
protective amulet. Ted Gioia

My Year of Horrible Reading

Week 1:
Dracula
By Bram Stoker

Week 2:
T he Haunting of Hill House
By Shirley Jackson

Week 3:
T ales of Mystery & Imagination
By Edgar Allan Poe

Week 4:
Carrie
By Stephen King

Week 5:
The Passion According to G.H.
By Clarice Lispector

Week 6:
T ales
By H.P. Lovecraft

Week 7:
T he Exorcist
By William Peter Blatty

Week 8:
The Woman in Black
By Susan Hill

Week 9:
N ausea
By Jean-Paul Sartre

Week 10:
I Am Legend
By Richard Matheson

Week 11:
G host Stories of Henry James
By Henry James

Week 12:
Interview with the Vampire
By Anne Rice

Week 13:
A merican Psycho
By Bret Easton Ellis

Week 14:
L ast Stories and Other Stories
By William T. Vollmann

Week 15:
G host Stories of an Antiquary
By M.R. James

Week 16:
R osemary's Baby
By Ira Levin

Week 17:
T he King in Yellow
By Robert W. Chambers

Week 18:
Rebecca
By Daphne Du Maurier

Week 19
The Woman in the Dunes
by Kōbō Abe

Week 20
The Dark Eidolon
by Clark Ashton Smith

Week 21
O ff Season
by Jack Ketchum