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. Word of warning, he does tone the gore down from the first book and it is noticeable. Comparing it to standard, generic horror this is very violent and brutal. But it's just not as frequent as in Offseason. It did leave me wanting a little bit more in terms of carnage. 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".

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. 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. The whole concept of the movie was ludicrous, and was delivered by the actors and actresses with no conviction, which just made it even more difficult to buy into the story and the world that director Andrew Van Den Houten was trying to sell with "Offspring".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.

This cannibal tribe uses a ploy with the teen girl they have covered in blood to gain entry and go for the baby. Luke and Claire help to get the child out of the house before they do, while David is murdered and Amy is taken hostage. With the cops nearby and Steven on his way, this will all come to a head in an interesting showdown. This is the follow up to the book OFF SEASON and it was written about 11 years after the first one. 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. The thing is, at first, I wasn’t sure I was going to write this little review on this book. I thought for sure it wouldn’t pass my scoring. But the more I read, the more I realized I couldn’t put it down. Ketchum crafts this story using a theme (in my opinion) that basically just shows human beings at their most primal. They’re all acting on one basic instinct: survival. Whether it’s the crazy cannibal family hunting and butchering and *gulp* raping people in brutal fashion…or it’s one of the heroes breaking a child’s skull against a cave wall because that same kid is trying to rip his throat out…it’s a horror survival tale using the most extreme imagery and violence. Everything about it is meant to offend and screw with you. Offspring" is basically a better version of "Off Season," which was an excellent book. This sequel improves on characters, which are better written here, suspense, and quality in general, falling short only at the end, during the climax.

La segunda mitad, es en realidad una única escena que no da respiro. De hecho, pensaba leer un rato, y terminé devorándolo de una sentada. I was going to say all this, but then I glanced up at the technical information in this IMDb entry. 100 minutes, it says. A hundred! But my UK rented copy was only 76 minutes; both the sleeve and the DVD timer confirm it. That's a quarter of the film gone! No wonder the plot seems sketchy, and you can't follow what's happening. But it was so much more than kids doing that, there was also their inbred parents, along with lots of topless women, and creepy sexual encounters. An update of the Scottish Sawney Beane legend and transplanting to Maine and the Canadian coast, it has some promising ideas and a couple of effective sequences, but it fails to establish them or develop them properly. What's with the lighthouse keeper? We get a glimpse of a newspaper clipping while the opening credits roll, and one of the characters makes a brief reference during the film, but this history deserved telling properly, even if only narrated by one of the characters, and could have added real mythic power to the plot. But it appears the film-makers just couldn't be bothered. Sequel First: Only the latter two books of the 'Off Season' trilogy were made into films. The first has yet to be adapted due to rights issues.

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 plot is quite simple. First there were six New Yorkers. Then there were five. Then there were...you get the picture. Beyond that, I have also read Ketchum's short story collection "Peaceable Kingdom", which truth be told I found very uneven as a collection; the curious part is that Ketchum himself admits upfront in the introduction: "As a writer, I'm all over the place". But I don't think it was the variety of themes, as he self-diagnosed, it's more that he works better when he's not *consciously* trying to be edgy or "dark", but rather when he simply writers about... well, about people. The only thing I enjoyed in Off Season was Ketchum’s writing. We have a limited supply of Ketchum novels now that he is gone so I will probably read the sequels to Off Season (Offspring and The Woman) at some point. If you are looking for a horror novel to get the adrenaline flowing, though, I wouldn’t recommend Off Season. Violent horror shouldn’t be so boring. The ending is nihilistic. Ketchum was trying to make a point about the random senselessness of the universe, but his publishers made him put a positive spin on a few characters. The unabridged version removes the positive.

Bleiler, Richard (January 1, 2003). Supernatural Fiction Writers: Guy Gavriel Kay to Roger Zelazny (2nded.). Charles Scribner's Sons. p.517. ISBN 978-0-6843-1252-1.This book was no holds barred in all departments. The afterward by the author highlights how graphic the book was for its times, but it still is. Put it this way, if it were to be adapted Rob Zombie would be the man to do it. However, the violence, sex etc all suit the story. So to answer the question the book delivers on its promises! The narrator was also a good match to the story. Pen Name: Ketchum itself is a pen name for Dallas Mayr. Another pseudonym he used was Jerzy Livingston. This edition is slightly different than the original American edition, but not as complete as The Unexpurgated Edition.