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 He r rmann. 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.
If horror could be achieved simply by multiplying mutilations, Ketchum would be the master of the idiom
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.