Even from the start, when the movie starts with newspaper clippings, weird music and special effected distribution names, the feeling is that the movie is bad. I blame the director for this. Quite a horror gem this could have been with just a little more attention to detail and a different cast.

So I went in expecting this sequel to up the carnage factor, but Ketchum subverted my expectations and as I tapped the screen to flip to 100% complete, I could not help but feel a little cheated. Between that and the retread factor readily apparent here, this ends up being just a decent read, even if from a master craftsman. Why? That's easy to answer - food. They are cannibals and they know nothing besides breeding, hunting, killing and eating. Ok. I am almost totally convinced now that a Splatterpunk novel that also happens to be a good book simply does not exist. This was disastrous. All of the characters are interchangeable. All of the dudes could be called Chad and all of the girls, Britney, and it'd be no harder to tell them apart than it already is. I mean literally, the only way I could tell one of the Chad's from the others is that Chad #2 wore glasses, and actually I think they broke at one point and now I'm not entirely sure he even wore them in the first place. Holy crap, what a first novel! It's not entirely perfect - the characters are a bit thin, many of them barely rising out of cardboard cutout territory prior to their victimization - but it is compulsively readable and utterly engrossing.Ketchum spends the first half setting up the book with some decent character work and identifying sub plots before the brown stuff hits the fan and things go absolutely bonkers in the second half. It's a good formula and makes things very tense and exciting as the story progresses. A few months after the book was published I got a letter from a fan who said he’d enjoyed the read immensely. Until he got to that line. Except - and this is a big exception - events aren't quite so big, bold and nasty in the sequel. Published ten years after the original novel, I can't help but wonder if Ketchum mellowed a bit in the intervening decade. Terrible things still do happen - many of them to the sympathetic characters - but one only has to compare the endings of each novel to appreciate this possibility. In The Unexpurgated Edition of Off Season, the hero is killed at the eleventh hour. In Offspring, the hero miraculously survives in a moment that would likely give Lazerus pause. And then 76 minutes later, barely achieving the minimum respectable length for a feature film, it comes to an abrupt end, with several characters and plot lines unresolved. Please no, don't tell me you're leaving the door open for a sequel. (Adopt appropriate gravelly voice: Offspring 2 – the new generation!) In between, there's a load of confused stumbling around in night-time woods or on stretches of beach that look nothing like the earlier panoramic daytime shots we had of the coastline. In a rural area off the coast of Maine live a tribe of cannibals. Over the decades travellers and townspeople have disappeared here, but these have been chalked up to the nature of an increasingly mobile, exploding population. People disappear every minute all over the world, don't they?

Pen Name: Ketchum itself is a pen name for Dallas Mayr. Another pseudonym he used was Jerzy Livingston. I am always leery of sequels. There seems to be two types of sequel writers. Those who are in it for the money. "Shake that moneymaker! Keep them wanting more". Then there is the reluctant writer who is nagged by his publisher to write a sequel to his best selling novel. "OK! OK! just leave me alone. I'll write a sequel then complain to the press that I never wanted to do it". When the real action finally started, it was brutal and gory and relentless. I can see where extreme horror lovers would find things to enjoy in Off Season, but I simply didn’t care what was happening to anyone. Horror for horror’s sake just doesn’t do anything for me. I want to care about someone, something, anything. I didn’t have a reason to care other than just knowing it’s wrong for people to be tortured and eaten. The savages themselves were presented more as animals than humans so that actually eased the horror in my mind instead of enhancing it.His eyes were thin narrow slits. They glittered in the moonlight. Behind them, in pain, hid the wolf. She would draw the wolf out, snapping." While I really liked this book, I feel compelled to make a few introductory remarks before I discuss the specific merits of the story. I will give Mr. Ketchum the benefit of the doubt and say that I do not believe it was his intention in writing this book to come across as a snobby, elitist, “anti” cannibal bigot. However, the fact remains that this novel is yet another example of popular media perpetrating the negative stereotype of cannibalism. I feel it's long past time to give a more balanced view of the subject in the hopes of fostering greater understanding of this alternative lifestyle. When Marc Jaffe at Ballantine bought the book it was on the condition that I’d be willing to rewrite. And I was. Of course I was. It was my first novel and I was delighted to have the contract. Did they think I was crazy? I’d rewrite in a minute. We were all very much aware that the book was over-the-top violence-wise, that it had the kind of teeth pretty much unseen before in mass-market fiction. It was just that quality that they were buying. But I knew I’d have to make some cuts. So. This book is absolutely brutal and gory. Content warnings for rape, graphic abuse. Just wanted to give a heads up for any reader friends this might be triggering for. After a great beginning, the central plot gets rolling when the bad guys, 3 couples from Manhattan, arrive to stay at a remote cabin near where the family lives. The family, consisting of several dozen members ranging from an elderly matriarch to children under 5, decides that the 3 couples will provide several weeks worth on meals and go about planning to acquire them. That sums up the basic outline of the plot and it is really in its execution that the novel shows its chops.