September. A beautiful New York editor retreats to a lonely cabin on a hill in the quiet Maine beach town of Dead River – off season – awaiting her sister and friends. Nearby, a savage human family with a taste for flesh lurks in the darkening woods, watching, waiting for the moon to rise and night to fall.
And before too many hours pass, 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.
Also features Winter Child.
| Publisher | 47North |
|---|---|
| Year | 2013 |
| Format | Paperback |
| Pages | 308 |
| Country | USA |
| ISBN | 978-1477840528 |
Spanish edition of Off Season, translated by Juan Pascual, also contains the short story Winter Child (translated as Hija del invierno).
This edition is slightly different than the original American edition, but not as complete as The Unexpurgated Edition.
From the Afterword to The Unexpurgated Edition (edited to avoid possible spoilers):
“There was one…change I made…for the British paperback.
At the very end of the original, [a character is] in the ambulance, shot up with painkillers and speculating through her haze on whether these people who are treating her are paramedics or doctors. She hoped they were doctors, reads the line.
A few months after the book was published I got a letter from a fan who said he’d enjoyed the read immensely. Until he got to that line.
He went on to say that he was in fact a paramedic and in [her] situation, she’d be far better off in the hands of a trained ambulance crew than with a bunch of doctors. I checked it out and he was right of course. Whoops. I hadn’t done my homework. I wrote back and apologized and thanked him for bringing the error to my attention and promised that if the book ever went into another printing anywhere I’d fix it.
In ’95 the Brits at Headline came along and I did.“
The story behind the gruesome legend…
It shocked horror fans everywhere – Jack Ketchum’s Off Season, the brutal and harrowing story of an inbred family of cannibals in present-day Maine. Some reader were horrified, others outraged. Yet no one could put the book down. An instant cult classic.
Now the legend lives on.
A new generation of terror.
The local sheriff of Dead River, Maine, thought he’d killed them off ten years ago – a primitive, cave-dwelling tribe of predatory savages. But somehow, the clan survived. To breed. To hunt. To kill and eat. Now the peaceful residents who came to Dead River to escape civilization, are fighting for their lives. And there’s only one way to do it:
Unleash the primal savagery lurking in their own hearts.
