Reviews with content warning for Gore - Off Season

With Ketchum, he makes a great offering from the woods with his book titled Off Season. How as an author, Ketchum doesn't hold back on showing the brutality of these cannibals as they target a gathering of friends as their latest meals. With how these characters are struggling to eat and survive; it means that no one can be safe from the savagery of nature or civilization. Almost all of their ends are met in a descriptively graphic, disturbing manner with how these characters are burned, bitten, and chewed up. However, Off Season's not having reliance on plot armour doesn't make up for how the story is conveyed in writing prose that sometimes veers off into being clunky or needlessly focused on the sexualization of the female vacationers. Furthermore, the characters can also be seen as pretty flat, which can hurt the need for the audience to connect with these characters as they struggle to stay alive in Maine's wilderness.

With that being said of Off Season, it seems that Ketchum knows how to build up the suspense and when to escalate the tension to be more effective as opposed to having the gore instantly explode on his pages. These dreadful scenes of tension can be either the scene of the cannibals watching Carla and Jim having sex or one of the cannibals playing with Marije like she is a piece of meat before she gets the upper hand by biting into his privates. Scenes like these can be most effective as they are being used to build up for a quick getaway into another shocking situation.

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adventurous dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75

This book definitely has the horror movie vibe to it. Like classic slasher movie with victims settings etc. I really like how the chapters are divided into time so you actually see the real time of how within 4-5 hours everything changed

I was scared/creeped out by the ferel children at the beginning, but the more I read about these fucked up people it was like the more it clocked that this can't be real people, even with some knowledge of technology like tape they somehow don't have empathy even for their own people? Or mourning their own dead? Didn't take away from how their creepy little family horrors work, just made me a bit more aware of "Oh this is just fiction"

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