Off Season - Unexpurgated Hard Cover Edition

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a b c d Mann, Laurie D. T. "Bram Stoker Award Winners". dpsinfo.com. Archived from the original on January 13, 2013 . Retrieved March 11, 2018.

There are scenes of torture which are neither scary or harrowing just stupid due to the fact they're so over the top. The gore in this film is so crude, with bits of leg here and a rubber torso there. The fact it's done in such a straight way makes it even stupider because the whole thing just becomes laughable. The longer the film goes on the dumber it gets. It's just one ineffective scare or anticlimax after another. My partner got so bored she started doing a puzzle. I braved it through to the end and wished I hadn't. The monsters that prey on the civilized enjoying a cabin in the off season is a savage family of few adults and a brood of children. They have a taste for meat. They prefer human flesh. This group instinctively knows that fear makes flesh more tender. They are masters of inflicting terror. The little boy was the only civilised person with a brain in the movie, the rest of the cannibal victims doing nothing but crying oh my god or holy s*** while they are eaten alive. If the premise of the movie was that people can sink to terrible lows, then why conclude that civilised westerners are not capable of directed violent behaviour when they are in trouble? Especially mothers with children, I mean I am afraid of those even in real life. That kind of thinking brought the movie down. That and the directing.Ketchum died of cancer on January 24, 2018, in New York City at the age of 71. [14] [15] [16] Awards and nominations [ edit ] Spree Killer: The main antagonists in The Lost and Joyride are these. Both are psychopathic young men based on real-life murderers, although only Joyride was inspired by an actual spree murder. As far as the specific plot elements of Ketchum's story, I thought they were fine. I find cannibalism, graphic torture and human dismemberment just as funny and amusing as the next guy and thought that the author did a nice job of providing an authentic and detailed representation of the practices discussed. While I do not currently practice cannibalism, I did experiment with the lifestyle for a time in college. During this time I learned a lot about the “Same Species Sustenance” Community and met a lot of wonderful people, several of whom I still count among my close friends (as long as I am armed). Thus, defending the rights and the dignity of the cannibal community is something about which I have strong feelings. Early-Installment Weirdness: Ketchum’s early work for men’s magazines is quite different than the horror fiction he is most known for. I suppose Ketchum is best summed up by what Peter Straub once said of him: "people seek (his) books for the wrong reasons, but stay for the right ones".

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. Of course, Ketchum likes to explore the darkness of humanity. Here we have Steve who is a scumbag. They have him go a bit over the top in that, but it doesn't hurt the film. There's an interesting scene with him in a cave with the cannibals, where he actually offers his wife to them. It is a bit too on the nose of comparing who is the real savage here, Steven or them. He does seem to be getting off on watching what they do his wife as well.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. 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. What makes this book so scary - and scary it is my friends: I was tense for the last three quarters of the book. It never lets up! - is the idea that you have these (hunters) killers who see humans as nothing other than food. You can't bargain with them, much like a carrot can't bargain with you to rather eat the peas. If there is no reason for them NOT to kill you, what hope do you have left?

Ketchum has become a kind of hero to those of us who write tales of terror and suspense. He is, quite simply, one of the best in the business.”—Stephen King" Take That, Critics!: 'Group of Thirty' is a humorous short story in which an Author Avatar of Ketchum is kidnapped by a group of critics upset over the violence in his work. The only problem is the climax, which doesn't seem . . . climactic enough, and is just awfully similar to the ending of the original. That said, the tone of the book's end is much different than that in "Off Season." Breakout Villain: The Woman originally appeared as one member of a cannibal clan in the novel Offspring and died at the end of it. Pollyanna McIntosh's performance in the film adaptation was so impressive the ending was changed as a way to allow the character to appear in future installments. The Woman later become the central character of her own novel and McIntosh would go on to reprise the character for two more films.

This author's works (that don't have their own pages) include examples of:

But onto the really good stuff. In this one Ketchum gives us chapters from the cannibals' perspectives. He's not trying to create sympathy here, which would have ruined the story in my opinion, but does it to give us real insight and develop individual personalities. We learn aspect of their closed off society and what comes across as a religion. I found this fascinating. What makes Off Season so effective and important is Ketchum’s masterful manipulation of the reader. Just as in Psycho, Off Season’s erstwhile hero, Carla, is killed first and most horribly. This is Ketchum grabbing the bullhorn and screaming at the reader: “No one is safe or off-limits in this book! Not even you!” And while Off Season muses on such “big ideas” as the rational v. the natural, the family unit, and urban v. rural, its most enduring message concerns the abrupt ugliness of human violence, and how people face such extreme situations and horrors that come out of nowhere. The violence that occurs in this book touches us so profoundly because it is perfectly reminiscent of the awful and sudden turns that life can take. It is ultimately the unpredictable, uncompromising way Ketchum rains his terrors down upon his characters and the reader that earns Off Season a place in the canon of classic thriller fiction. 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. When it was over I went home and a few weeks later produced [this] version of Off Season… The original I tossed in the garbage.