The key piece of horror, it seems, is caring about the characters.  I think deep, reasonable characterizations are a huge part of what makes Stephen King so successful.  He writes about the everyman, you believe the characters, and you care when horrible, horrible things start to happen to them.  I just read Jack Ketchum’s Off Season.  According to the back of the book, “five civilized, sophisticated people and one tired old country sheriff will learn just how primitive we all are beneath the surface…and that there are no limits at all to the will to survive.”  This blurb did not sell me.  I read The Girl Next Door and thought it was pretty sick, I liked it all right, but didn’t think the writing was terribly stellar.  This one is set in Maine, which I say I like, but I always scoff when writers “from away” try and do justice to my state.  Ketchum didn’t do Maine justice.  He did toss in some good facts, (Washington country was, at the time of his writing [and maybe still is] poorer than Appalachia) but he didn’t get the feel.  All the Mainers were like stereotypes of locals resenting summer people, and while this does happen, Maine natives DO have other things on their minds.

                Apparently to Jack Ketchum, “sophisticated and civilized” in this context, means “from New York City.”  They are all petulant snots who are self absorbed and absolutely unsympathetic.  The character they spent the most time on, Carla, is absolutely unlikable…and killed off very quickly, leaving the reader in the hands of relative strangers.  We were just sort of starting to get to know her when she was pulled nude from her boyfriend’s penis, dragged outside, strung up from a tree and roasted alive.  Boyfriend didn’t make it, either.  I didn’t care for the characters, I was just annoyed about the chapters I read about her cleaning the house.  I also didn’t care that she was only using the egotistical actor boyfriend for sex, especially when they both died so early on (I guess it’s fitting, she was using him for sex and they died having trashy, dirty sex.)

                These characters, both the villains (who I will address in a moment) and the protagonists (if you can call them that) all spent a lot of time naked and sexed up.  Yes, evil, animalistic hillbillies probably spend a lot of time doing “it”, but you’d think they’d have some sense of self preservation.  It’s never, I mean never, a good idea to force a captive to fellate you.  It came as such a shock when she bit off his junk.  Ketchum’s interest in sex distracted me from the horror at hand.  If the hillbillies had been more practical about their malicious intents, I would have been better sold.  And the character who was so traumatized she forgot to get dressed?  It didn’t work for me, and removed me from the action.

                The hillbillies.  They didn’t seem to have a motive.  They liked human meat, they lived in a filthy cave and impregnated one another, and they were evil.  In one of my classmate’s WIPs about hillbillies, they have a religious motive, and are very clear about their intents and purpose.  These guys have no sense of preservation, the book opens with them making a mistake and letting a woman live to tell about them.  How were they not discovered long ago?  There is no logic and no sense of self preservation (like I said above) and this pulls any interest I have in them.

                The most interesting part of the book is Ketchum’s afterword, where he discusses the publisher wanting to tame the book back in the eighties, how it was too graphic, and the concessions he made thinking “this is my first book, I’d better do what they want.”  In the original draft, the closest thing we have to a hero dies in the end, a la Night of the Living Dead, erroneously shot by the sheriff in the confusion of a shoot out.  Apparently Ballantine said no way to that, and in the original publication, he lives, giving hope to all the readers out there.  The version I read was published in 2006, and Nick dies at the end, the way he was supposed to.  It was one of the only things I did like in that book, a little “ha!” at hope.

                This was worth the $0.66 I paid for it and the few hours I spent reading it.  But man, not by much.  When I see a Stephen King recommendation on a cover (I’m talking to you, The Ruins) I need to start running in the other direction.