If you trod into the horror section of the local bookstore in 1981, and looked slightly to the left of Stephen King, your eyes would have been drawn to a slim paperback with an all-black cover, save for that single drip of red blood. The title, Off Season, was printed in slightly raised lettering, but still black-on-black. To read what it said, you had to pick it up and turn it slightly, angling it in order for the fluorescent lighting in the drop ceiling to reflect off it just so.
But chances are, before you read the title, you saw the author's name in that bright white font: "Jack Ketchum". It's a name that seems reasonable for a horror writer, although a quick glance at the copyright page would reveal this was a pseudonym affected by a guy named Dallas Mayr who, and let's be honest here, sounds like somebody who should be ghost-writing for Louis L'Amour. For most people, the name "Jack Ketchum" didn't mean much. Those better versed in the history of the American West felt a prickling sense of recognition.
Mayr's adopted moniker was a throwback to Thomas Edward "Black Jack" Ketchum, an outlaw executed in 1901 for the crime of attempting to rob a train. Ketchum's death is notorious in New Mexico history: sentenced to die by hanging, none of the men in charge of carrying out the sentence actually knew how to hang someone using a gallows. The inexperience of the executioners resulted in Ketchum's death by instantaneous decapitation instead of slow strangulation.
Which some enterprising photographer turned into a postcard, because of course he did.
The sight caused considerable consternation to the gawkers assembled to witness what they assumed would be a bloodless ordeal, and ensured "Black Jack" Ketchum would be remembered long after his head was sewn back on to his neck for burial.
Dallas Mayr couldn't possibly have known just how prophetic his choice of pseudonym would be, but someone at Ballantine must have had an inkling. The tag line assigned to Off Season by marketing was, "The Ultimate Horror Novel". Quite the charge for a first-time novelist dipping his toes into a burgeoning field. Though it wasn't a boast Mayr himself made, the charge would stick despite Ballantine's every effort to the contrary.
The result nearly destroyed Mayr's career before it got off the ground.
This is my personal copy of the original edition of Off Season, found at a second-hand store in exactly the condition depicted. The book has been beat to absolute hell: the spine is folded and creased, the cover is chipped and damaged, and the lower-right corner of the book looks to have taken a quick dip in a puddle at some point. At least two separate times, it was used as a writing surface by someone who pressed down too hard with the pen on the paper above it.
It clearly has seen some shit.
But the only story it's willing to tell is the one contained between the covers. On everything else, it stands mute. Beaten, tortured, and distressed, it refuses to give up its secrets no matter how many times I run my fingers over the still-slick glossy cover in amazement that the glue still holds the pages in place forty years later.
"What happened to you?" I want to ask it. "Who hurt you and left you in this shape? And why are you still so beautiful?"
This book looks exactly how I felt after I read Off Season for the first time.
My initial experience with Jack Ketchum came in 2004 when Overlook Connection Press published Off Season: The Unexpurgated Edition. With an introduction by Douglas Winters, and an afterward by Ketchum himself which explained why there was a need for an "unexpurgated" version of the novel in the first place, it contains not just the story, but the story behind the story.
The parallels to Richard Laymon's similar fate at the hands of a different publisher in the early 80's are uncanny. Only in Laymon's case, he got his first novel, The Cellar, released in basically the same form he'd submitted it. Warner didn't upend his career until they gutted his second book, The Woods Are Dark. The failure of that book tanked Laymon's career in the US until horror audiences and publishers re-discovered him in the late 90's and early 2000's.
Ketchum's first manuscript, by contrast, was filleted and deboned by Ballantine's editorial staff until the story had lost much of the visceral punch Ketchum had intended. But it turned out even that wasn't enough. Originally planned for a huge print run, backed by a generous advertising campaign which promised to turn Ketchum into a household name, an early review of the manuscript by the New York alternative culture newspaper The Village Voice accused Ketchum of writing, and Ballantine of publishing, "violent pornography" of no literary value.
The ad campaign to push Off Season as the next big thing was quietly scuttled.
The posters and in-store displays intended to provoke audience interest never materialized.
The cover art, designed to capitalize on and promote the book's status as "the ultimate horror novel", suddenly went the more minimalist route as seen above:
Copies flew off store shelves despite (or perhaps because of) the remarks by scandalized book reviewers and reader word-of-mouth, but re-order requests were ignored. Ballantine sold through their original print run and, despite considerable interest from the general public, decided their reputation was more important than making money this time. They washed their hands of Dallas Mayr and his special brand of horror in favor of other, safer writers whom reviewers would not condemn in such harsh terms. The fame and fortune promised to Mayr never materialized.
Still, Mayr never stopped writing until his death in 2018. Over the course of his career, he amassed seven Bram Stoker nominations and four wins, along with the World Horror Convention's Grand Master Award for outstanding contribution to the horror genre as a whole. A number of his stories were optioned for film, perhaps the most notorious being The Girl Next Door, inspired by the real-life torture/murder of Sylvia Likens. Ten years after writing Off Season, he returned to the town of Dead River, Maine for its 1991 sequel, Offspring, which is just as explosively grim, mean-spirited, and visceral as the original.
You may have noticed that for all the word salad vomitus of this article, I've said nothing about what Off Season is about, why it was so controversial, or what the editors forced Ketchum to cut out and what Ketchum fought to retain.
There's a reason for that.
If you decide to read Off Season, I want you to go into it with no preconceived notions and no idea what's about to happen. It's a tale of cannibalism run amok, of people pushed to the breaking point, which draws on the same influences that gave us The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Hills Have Eyes. It is a violent, brutal, unrelenting assault on the reader's senses, reported through a narrator who sticks to just the facts, whether he's talking about a young woman cleaning up a cabin in preparation for visitors, or what's going through a barely-human cannibal's mind as a victim is de-limbed while still alive in preparation of the night's meal.
Should you pursue Off Season, and I cannot in good conscience claim anyone "should" read this book, I want you to promise me two things.
First, I want you to get the unexpurgated edition. This isn't difficult -- in fact, it would be far harder and more expensive to get hold of the original, cut-down version. But you need the unexpurgated edition for the ending, which Ballantine forced Ketchum to alter.
And second? Don't read any introductions. Don't read any reviews, or plot summaries, or spoilers, or the Wikipedia page, or anything else. Just start with page one of chapter one, and go from there. You'll either hate me or you'll thank me -- hell, maybe you'll do both -- but you'll feel something either way.
Is Off Season in the running for "The Ultimate Horror Novel"? Not today, no. But Off Season wasn't written today; it was written in 1980 and published at a time when nobody else was writing books like this. It, and Laymon's The Cellar, fired the opening salvo which opened the eyes of dozens of other would-be writers who realized there were boundaries to be pushed, and who started pushing them.
Is Off Season punishing, unrelenting, and borderline abusive to the reader? Yes. Unequivocally, absolutely, undeniably. It's not the type of book you read because you enjoy it, it's the type of book you read so you can say you survived it. It's a McKamey Manor of horror fiction: you can tap out any time you like, but the experience will forever alter you.
My copy is a mirror of my emotional state in the aftermath of the first time I read it. If you're OK with that happening to you, the experience is only a couple clicks and a few dollars away.
Good luck. And don't say I didn't warn you.