Off Season

By: Jack Ketchum

Narrated by: Richard Davidson

Length: 7 hrs and 50 mins

Publisher's summary

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 to the will to survive.

©1981 Jack Ketchum (P)2009 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

"If you read Off Season on Thanksgiving, you probably won't sleep until Christmas." (Stephen King)

100 Must-Read Thrillers (International Thriller Writers)

awesome

I researched gruesome books and this one delivered. The beginning was a bit slow and I wondered what was so terrifying about this book...be patient. It doesn't disappoint.

Ketchum never disappoints

Ketchum is a mad beast and I LOVE IT. If you haven't read his other works two of my favorites are The Girl Next Door and Stranglehold, stories that slip under your skin, then pry it from your muscles

Excellent book

This is an excellent horror book that I stayed up until 4 AM to finish. It's a great story that gives a plausible setup for a group of feral cannibals hunting a group of believable and non idiotic New Yorkers.

The narrator has a good sounding voice, and reads the narrative bits well enough, but his reading of dialog is absolutely tone deaf and pretty terrible. It's really baffling tbh and the only detraction from the audio book.

The best of extreme horror

I couldn't put it down! Narrator was superb. Will be reading more of Ketchums works...I'm just disappointed I hadn't discovered him sooner.

Good not great

It’s a short brutal nasty story but that’s what I wanted. If that’s what you’re looking for go for it.

Slow burn atmospheric horror, worst narration ever

Possibly the worst narrator I've ever heard. Halfway through the story I bought the book just to make it stop.

loved it

This book was awesome. The imagery projected into my mind by the writer was on a whole new level.

loved the ending (no spoilers)

I had trouble concentrating on some parts of the book. I think the narrator did great with character voices and emphasis on certain things, but his normal reading voice is a little Ben Stein (clear eyes) for me.

Nihilistic and Bleak, But Real

I was a teenager when I first read Jack Ketchum's Off Season in an already used paperback edition I'd found in a second-hand store or at a flea market. At the time, the book seemed truly graphic and bleak in a way most horror novels didn't approach. Of course, most of my reading up to that point had been Stephen King, Peter Straub, Robert R. McCammon, Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, Anne Rice, and other more commercially accessible authors. Of those authors, Barker and McCammon were the two who most closely approached what I was reading from Ketchum.
If I enjoyed the bleak and hopeless tone of that edition of the book, I was sure to be in for a treat with the less censored edition released this century.
A good deal of the change to this story only arises in the final stretch of the story, but those relatively minor changes in terms of text produce massive changes in the outcome of the narrative. Listening to this audiobook edition of the novel, I understand why Ketchum was dissatisfied with the edits his publisher demanded. This was a story that pulled no punches and held nothing back, laying bare the callous inhumanity of the world we live in and the indifference of the universe itself.
A tragic hero becomes altogether more tragic in this edition of Off Season, and the story benefits from that transformation.
Those who read the original edition of this book may have wondered just how much worse a vacation to Northern Maine could have gone in the fall of 1981. Ketchum answers that question in this restored iteration of the tale. As the vacationers in the cabin are beset by the wild, raving tribe of barely human cannibals, you might notice some scenes that carry a bit more potency and illustrative violence...but the core of the story remains the same until you reach the end.
Richard Davidson's narration is great, though there are times when it seems as if the Maine accents are a bit more of a caricature. It makes for an enjoyable listen just the same.

Young and the Restless meets The Hills Have Eyes

This is on all the disturbing extreme horror must read lists so I had high hopes. But they definitely fell flat. Jack Ketchum’s writing is very much a 70s/80s macho man erotic horror. The way the women were written were the “all breasts, no brains” that you’d expect from the time period. None of the characters were particularly likable. I will say, I would be willing to reread as a physical copy. Part of my underwhelming experience was due to the narrator, which isn’t Jack Ketchum’s fault. All in all, good and gory but not at all my cup of tea.