And, to get up close and personal with the actual violence. What if I don’t do this? What if I do a book that’s set in real time, sort of the way that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was and the way Night of the Living Dead were? It gives you the illusion of real time. And that was going at the violence very directly and in your face.Įven Steve would turn away from the really down and gritty stuff. It seemed to me that there was something the movies were doing that the books were not doing. Jack Ketchum: After having gone to my little used bookstore and seeing that there was a resurgence of horror with King and Straub, Rosemary’s Baby, etc. I was looking for something I could do long term, so that I knew what I was doing when I got up in the morning - versus taking on piece meal writing assignments - without having to search for the next idea.ĭark Scribe: How much thought did you give to the commercial success of the story while you were writing the book? Meaning, did you know that people publishing fiction at that time were looking for that type of story? Or that that seemed like the next logical progression in horror at that time? I was doing fairly well as a magazine writer, so I wasn’t really making the change for the money. When you figure it out, it’s a lot per month. Jack Ketchum: One year, I did twenty-four or twenty-five pieces. I didn’t have an agent.ĭark Scribe: What precipitated the jump to novel writing? Jack Ketchum: When I did Off Season, I’d been writing fiction and non-fiction for (rock & roll and men’s) magazines for three years. In the second part of our in-depth interview with the legendary dark scribe, Ketchum chats at length about how his iconic 1981 classic novel Off Season made it into print, how the publishing industry didn’t immediately warm to his visceral brand of horror, and how a sequel came to pass.ĭark Scribe Magazine: Can you talk a little bit about where you were career-wise prior to writing Off Season? Did you have an agent? Last week, Dark Scribe Magazine’s Martel Sardina paid a visit to the movie set of Offspring, the film adaptation of Jack Ketchum’s Off Season sequel.

Offspring jack ketchum