Offspring - Dark Publications

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•	Off Season
•	The Girl Next Door
•	Hide and Seek
•	Peaceable Kingdom
•	Red

Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...

2 out of 5 stars

A copy of the first one,,,,,,,, February 12, 2004
5 out of 7 found this review helpful

I'm a big Jack ketchum fan, after reading "The Girl Next Door", but the sequal to the cult novel Off Season was far from special. If you read Off Season , there's really no need to read Off Spring because it's basically the same story, without the creative suspense of the first. Both books have the same synopsis,,,, A few people go to this small rural town for a vacation only to find that they are being attacked by cave dwelling cannibals. I can't really tell too much of the story because i would give away the plot to BOTH books. Off Season is worth reading. Off Spring lacks the creative slow suspense and terror that Jack Ketchums creates by describing horrific incidents as other characters witnesses them.
In short Off Spring pales in comparison to Off season.

5 out of 5 stars

Nice Limited Edition of Offspring August 12, 2006
4 out of 6 found this review helpful

Thanks to Overlook Connection Press for releasing this signed, limited hardcover edition of one of Ketchum's out of print novels. This sequel to Off Season is a fast paced follow-up to the original with some of the same characters returning to fight against some more nasty cannibals.

Sure, parts of it seem like more of the same, but Laymon's "Woods Are Dark" cannibal novels had four in the series plus mentions in other stories and all of those were good as well. Isn't that how most sequels go? Haven't you seen all of those Chainsaw movies that are virtual remakes of each other?

Bonuses for the limited edition of Offspring include the unexpurgated text and two afterwords by Ketchum. I would recommend this one for your Ketchum collection. I'm glad it's back in print again, and hope to see Leisure release a mass market edition.

4 out of 5 stars

Cannibalistic, Humanoid, Maine-Coast Dwellers July 23, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful

They eat your liver, but no fava beans or chianti. They are helped in their murderous rampage for part of the book by the stereotypical Evil Yuppie (a fairly overused, stock villain, but still effective). Between extremely graphic descriptions of human dissection, and some suspenseful moments of chasing, hiding, and hunter-becomes-hunted, there are some ruminations on evil that are quite substantial and complex. Consider how the cannibals are presented in such a way that we never feel any sympathy for them: a less careful author would've succumbed to the temptation to make these monsters more sympathetic, to give them a hint of caring or affection, at least for one another, if not for their victims. And also consider how flat they would've been if they were unregenerately evil, but w/o a glimpse into their inner thoughts (as they would appear in a torture porn movie version of this) - cackling clowns whooping it up around the fire as human entrails bubble away in the pot. But with their inner thoughts revealed, we have a look at what the author considers the essence of evil - selfish, almost solipsistic brutality (and here the use of the Evil Yuppie as comparison is effective).

2 out of 5 stars

Maybe I'm missing something... July 26, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful

I admit I make a mistake by reading a sequel as the first book I read by Ketchum. The reviews had been good on other novels, and I picked up the first I could find at the bookstore. I've already got a copy of "The Girl Next Door" so I'm willing to give him another chance, but this one did little for me.

While it may not be necessary to read the first one, I'd suggest it would be a great idea. It does take a while to get a feel for what has happened, and that is not a good thing for a book less than 300 pages in length. The narration is downright sparse, sometimes feeling oversimplified. Some characters are fairly well-developed, while others are glossed over, and their fate does not seem contingent upon how much history we have about them. It's like Ketchum couldn't decide who was important, or that he simply got in a hurry. The idea of having names of the children as "First Stolen" or "Second Stolen", man, woman (these are how the children are referred to) simply got old and difficult to follow after a short while. There were a few well-defined scenes that had some shock value, but they were not enough to hold the story together.

Overall, disappointing because of my expectations. Maybe the next one will be an improvement.

4 out of 5 stars

A quick, dread-laden read June 13, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful

I've read some reviews here that mention that Offspring contains the same basic plot as "Off Season", and well yeah, it sure does. But so does about a thousand other horror offerings from Richard Laymon's "Midnight's Lair" and Tobe Hooper's classic "Texas Chainsaw Massacre."

What makes Ketchum's "Off Season" and "Offspring" different is Ketchum's strong prose and great characterizations. Ketchum can make characters come alive with a few simple sentences enough to make an impact when bad things happen to the good people in the novel. And when bad things happen to bad people, you're both satisfied that justice has been served but repulsed by the horrors that happen.

"Offspring" may not blow you away some of Ketchum's other work does (i.e. "Girl Next Door"), but it is an exercise in mounting dread and quickly turned pages. If you enjoyed "Off Season", there's more than enough here to keep you entertained.

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