Monkey droppings - Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies: you read that correctly.

Today, the shelf monkey asks: "Who would win in a fight: zombies, pirates, or ninja?"

The answer? We all do.

The second answer? The monkey. No one beats the monkey.

Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies (2012, ChiZine)

James Marshall

I look away from the TV and back to the road. I'm drunk-driving for safety, but to double up on safety, I'm driving a bulldozer. It isn't one of those puny little bulldozers you see toppling trees sometimes. No. It's an enormous mining bulldozer. It's the kind of bulldozer you'd use to push down a mountain. I find that when I get into an accident while driving a gigantic bulldozer, it doesn't really bother me. And huge bulldozers are also excellent for zombie outbreaks because there are always a bunch of abandoned cars and pickup trucks in your way. The driver's area of my bulldozer is encased in (pock-marked) bullet- and sound-proof glass, overlaid by a chain-link cage that locks in order to protect occupants (me) from the undead and the few living people who escape the Zombie Acceptance Test and fend for themselves in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.

I've made quite a fuss over ChiZine Press the last little while. The Canadian publisher has introduced me to the works of David Nickle, Gemma Files, Robert J. Wiersema, Tim Lebbon, Gord Zajac, Claude Lalumière, Tom Piccirilli, Craig Davidson, Simon Logan, Nicholas Kaufmann, Douglas Smith, and Michael Rowe. Combined, these authors make up most of the top books I've read over the past three years. The worst I've ever said about a ChiZine release is, "That was pretty darn good."

So I'm habitually inclined to trust the judgment of its editors when it comes to delivering fascinating genre fiction. I've got Gemma Files' third Hexslinger book on deck, as well as The Steel Seraglio and In the Mean Time.

But even if you take ChiZine out of the equation, quite frankly there was no way I was not going to be interested in a book titled Ninja Versus Pirate Featuring Zombies (hereinafter NVPFZ). It's got three of my favourite pop culture things right in the title: zombies, ninja, and versus (you put versus in a title, you're guaranteed my attention; I'm looking at you, Godzilla versus Mothra).

Whatever I was expecting, however — battles of enormous bloodshed, adventure on the high seas, stealth kills in the shadows, some amalgam of all three — I did not get it in NVPFZ. What I got was a good old-fashioned spin-your-head-around-twice mindfu@#. Even now, weeks later, I'm not precisely sure what to make of it; I only know that I had a rollicking good time.

Ostensibly, NVPFZ is the tale of Guy Boy Man, a character whose name now goes on my list of favourite literary names, a list including Billy Pilgrim, Major Major Major Major, and Hiro Protagonist. Guy Boy Man is an exceedingly rich sixteen-year-old who sees himself as a pirate (although he wears the Pope's hat), trying to survive what appears to be a hellscape of a school populated by zombies with the help of his best friend Sweetie Honey, an African-American ninja. In addition to battling said zombies and his arch-nemesis The Principal with the help of a cadre of extremely attractive women, Guy Boy Man has fallen for a precocious pink-haired girl names Baby Doll15. Alas, he cannot proclaim his love for her, for if he does, he shall lose his trillions of dollars; so say the centaur from Fairyland who bequeathed him the money, a tidy sum which may have caused the collapse of the American financial system.

Yeah, this is weird. Quirky. Chaotic. Borderline nonsensical.

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It's also extremely loveable, if you can get past the sometimes-unbearable precociousness of Guy Boy Man's narrative voice. He's a pretty unlikable hero: petty, manic, narcissistic; at one point he uses disabled children to protect himself from a horde of troubled zombie teens. He plays the tough guy, complete with hardboiled quips, yet cannot properly handle a gun in a firefight. Yet James Marshall's book wouldn't work without it; the voice is precisely why the book maintains any sort of narrative thrust. Guy Boy Man never stops talking, creating a story that's almost ideal for this ADD generation. He's also one of the most unreliable of unreliable narrators I've come across; just how much is real and how much is the fevered imagination of a deranged adolescent mind. Guy Boy Man is a prototypical disenfranchised teenager, raging against everything and anything, and warping his view of thw world on a minute-by-minute basis to make it better conform to his nebulous ideology. NVPFZ plays fast and loose with the rules of its own reality, becoming a psychotropic mindscape where you cannot be surprised when a unicorn starts killing your soldiers, or a bevy of exotically beautiful Eastern European girls turns out to be genetically modified assassins. It's par for the course in Guy Boy Man's universe, and you either dig it or you don't.

Marshall promises that this is only book one in the How to End Human Suffering Series, with Zombie Versus Fairy Featuring Albinos soon to come. I just don't know where else this story can go, but I have confidence Marshall will bring his A game.

Verdict: Monkey really enjoyed, once he screwed his brain back in

Husk - The pictures! They're coming...ALIVE!

In addition to being a stunningly successful author in my own mind, did you know I'm also a talented screenwriter/director?

Yet what I have in obvious greatness, I lack in resources. So instead of an AVID editing suite (oh, those were the days!), I have iMovie software on my laptop. Instead of John Williams to compose a score, I have Creative Commons.

BUT...I have a secret weapon at my disposal. Or rather, seven secret weapons; a volleyball team's (plus one alternate) worth of nieces and nephews who are willing to work for...well, not peanuts, one has an allergy. But they work for far below scale, needing only words and hugs to get the job done right.

And so, without further rambling preamble, I present for your entertainment the next best thing to owing my  book itself (out October 1, check your nearest independent bookseller for your orders) -

Husk: The Book Trailer!

Please enjoy!

Thank you, nieces DeGroot and niece and nephews Redekop, your weeks of toil have not gone in vain. Expect a nice new lolly in your stockings come xmas.

If you've enjoyed this trailer, you may do two things to repay me: 1) purchase the book, and 2) share it with friends via the usual social networks (Twitter, Facebook, blogs, MySpace [does that still exist?]). Please do not share via the unusual social networks. Those places are creepy!

Monkey droppings - Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess

Today, the monkey puts on his spelunking gear and slowly lowers himself into the depths of another's psychosis.

Going really deep into this one. I can see stalactites hanging from the roof of his ego. And there's bat guano everywhere.

Pontypool Changes Everything (ECW Press, 1998: Chizine, 2010)
by Tony Burgess

At a breakfast table in Caesarea a couple sits across from each other. Their mouths are open and liver coloured. She tries to lick her bottom lip but misses, catching her tongue in the slippery well of skin at the base of her gums. The tongue pushes to a point in this pocket until the O of her lips reaches its limit and the tongue springs out, releasing a full pouch of liquid down her chin. Her husband mimics this, but he extends his tongue directly through the O, clearing its edges, missing the point.

Like all the other zombies, the only expression that these two can achieve is one of supernatural failure. Like gargoyles, they frown in exhausted masks of hopelessness. Her eyes rise into the bridge of her nose and tunnel up beneath her brow; the lashes have fallen into the tails of goldfish that fan across her cheeks. His eyes are the same, but for heavier lower lids that scoop out like wading pools, vividly red and beating with vulnerable membrane.

I know Tony Burgess. I like Tony Burgess. He's a good guy, easy to approach. Affable, even.

But I'd never want to be trapped inside his mind.

Burgess is one of the preeminent Canadian masters of literary horror, that vague subset of the horror genre where the story is told just too damn well to be relegated to (he writes with a sniff of derision) mere "horror." Dean Koontz has never even seen literary horror from his perch (nor do I believe he knows of its existence). Stephen King stops by on occasion (although it's been a while). Clive Barker visits frequently. Burgess has his own gazebo on the lawn, where he sits sipping absinthe from a silver cup.

Burgess's specialty is dropping insanity into the most mundane of surroundings. Basing many of his works in smalltown Ontario, Burgess excels at delving into that madness that peeks out the corners of everybody's eyes. In People Live Still in Cashtown Corners, its the gas jockey who decides that arbitrary murder is the best way to go. In Ravenna Gets, the populace of Ravenna decides en masse to destroy the populace of nearby Collingwood. In Idaho Winter (his first YA book), a young boy goes on a rampage after learning he's a character in a book.

Pontypool Changes Everything (hereinafter PCE) is ostensibly a zombie novel, yet relegating it to that qualification does it as much a disservice as assuming Moby Dick to be a book about whaling, Naked Lunch to be about drugs, and To Kill a Mockingbird to be about racism. The labels are superficially correct, but completely missing the point.

The plot of PCE defies easy summation; like David Lynch's Mulholland Drive — and if there are any two artists whose combined talents would result in the freakiest , most disturbing story ever put to film, it's these two — PCE weaves through reality and fantasy without distinction between the two, physically pushing at the reader's concepts of linear narrative as dreamlike imagery takes hold. Make no mistake, reading Tony Burgess takes effort, an effort many people will be unwilling to take (wimps). Leave them to their safe little zones, their Bentley Littles and Robin Cooks; yeah, I'm not a fan. There is no safe ground in Burgessland. Everything shifts, and if you think you're safe and steady, the world is about to drop out from beneath you. His words are slivers beneath your fingertips, burrowing in and refusing to budge.

Burgess's zombies are not the now-standard grabby and bitey undead of innumerable b-grade movies (although, to be fair, they do grab and bite on occasion). To start, the virus is not transmitted by blood, or saliva, or radiation, but through language:

The virus had hid silently for decades up in the roofs of adjectives, its little paws growing sensitive, first to the modifications performed there: then, sensing something more concrete pulling at a distance, the virus jumped into paradigms. It was unable to reach the interior working of the paradigm, however, due to its own disappearance near the core. The viruses bit wildly at the exterior shimmer of the paradigms, jamming selection with pointed double fangs. A terrible squealing ripped beneath the surface of the paradigms as they were destroyed. The shattered structure automatically redistributed its contents along syntagma, smuggling vertical mobiles across horizontal ropes. What was in the air had to travel as ground and the virus sauntered right into these new spaces, taking them over. Radical spaces evolved to compensate. Negative space became a fortune telling device. Positive space arched its back painfully, now pocked horribly by the frenzied migration of vehicles into the ground.

The plague first manifests itself in the infected person as a type of déjà vu, with an accompanying aphasia. Everything that happened presented itself as already happened. This infinitely complicated things. For as soon as the person adjusted, understanding that this was merely a symptom of the plague, his or her understanding slipped backward into the already happened. Each realization had to be doubled against itself into becoming understood next: an impossible therapy to maintain. The present tense was a slippery slope to anyone in remission. The "now" became a deepening lesion, and from it rose the smell of this new sickness.

There are two sections to PCE: in the first, "Autobiography," we follow a man who may or may not become a zombie himself stumble through the beginnings of a plague, intent on rescuing the newborn son he's never met. His reality mingles with detached flights of hallucination, and by the end, I'm not even sure there was a son. The second section, "Novel," tells the story of the zombie plague itself, and how it begins to affect the people of Ontario.

On September 7 strange new edicts are passed in the Ontario legislature with more hand-washing than wringing. and by late afternoon the instructions are handed over to heavily armed teams. They are directed to exercise maximum force immediately. To combat contagion all form of communication is banned. Speaking, listening, reading, even sign language are punishable at the brute discretion of Ontario's own licensed assassins. Citizens are instructed to stay at home and communicate only through nods or shakes of the head.

This is only a brief summary, as, like Lynch at his most mind-bending, Burgess resists a traditional narrative structure in favour of scenes that insinuate themselves into your medulla, and images that by turns fascinate and horrify. Other characters flit about, their importance to the story nebulous at best. One character may or may not be a ghost, or demon, or angel. Two children flee their parents and hide in an abandoned cabin, whereupon they commence to live an existence that would surely get the book summarily banned should those with weak temperaments and even weaker grasps of art versus reality ever read the book (not much chance there).

Sometimes, it's hard to even justify what you are reading as anything more than being weird for weird's sake (not that there's anything wrong with that). Yet even if PCE were to be thoughtlessly shoved into the 'bizarro' genre of literature — a serious literary genre that combines satire and absurdism with non-traditional narratives and crazy-weird plot devices: while it has a fan in sci-fi/fantasy grand master Michael Moorcock, whose acclaimed Jerry Cornelius series could be classified as bizarro, the genre is usually populated with titles such as The Ass Goblins of Auschwitz, Gigantic Death Worm, Squidpulp Blues, and Unicorn Knife Fight — it would still stand head and shoulders above its peers. Burgess is a fine writer, and his prose oozes menace while following an inner logic that virtually demands repeated readings.

Burgess is never going to be to everyone's taste; like I said, he demands some work on the part of the reader, like most artists do. If your taste leans toward a relatively undemanding horror where vampires sparkle and werewolves solve crimes, stay away; if you've replayed Lost Highway more time than you can count, wondering how Bill Pullman transmogrified into Balthazar Getty, you'll undoubtedly love Pontypool.

Verdict: The Monkey Loves, Although His Head Hurts a Bit

P.S. Bruce McDonald, with Burgess as Screenwriter, produced a film version of Pontypool which — while an utterly fabulous flick, grim and dark, one of the best zombie films of the past decade — takes serious liberties with the text. I advise reading one and watching the other, but recognize beforehand that they are markedly different monsters.

Monkey droppings: The Good, the innocuous, and the ugly

The monkey's done a lot of 'high lit' reading lately.

Time to go genre, clear the palate, get some junk food.

Healthy, well-regarded junk food.

Subway, not Arby's.

Three reviews, hot and fresh and ready for the table. One good, one innocuous (bad seemed too harsh), and one ugly (think Hollywood-ugly, not ugly-ugly).

THE GOOD

Lanceheim (HarperCollins, 2010)
by Tim Davys

"Without doubt, faith is worth nothing."

In 2009, Tim Davys (a pseudonym) released the English translation version of Amberville, the first in what I have now discovered to be the Mollisan Town quartet. It was a hardboiled noir dealing with issues of faith, death, fate, and existence. It was also populated exclusively by stuffed animals, automatically appealing to a strange side of me that enjoys unique literary examples of anthropomorphization (Hello, Winkie! Hello, Hal Jam!).

I loved Amberville, and tore into its sequel Lanceheim with gusto, expecting another tale of Eddie Bear and his investigatory exploits. Imagine my surprise (and later delight) at finding Lanceheim to be an entirely different beast, set in another section of Mollisan Town (segmented into the quarters of Amberville, Lanceheim, Tourquai, and Yok), this time not a detective noir but a parable, a play on the Christ mythology that takes on many of the same themes of Philip Pullman's The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ yet plays them far more intriguingly (and I really enjoyed Scoundrel Christ).

Lanceheim follows two separate narrative paths: on one, the reader follows Reuben Walrus, a famed composer seeking a miracle following a diagnosis of quickly oncoming deafness; on the other, a fellow named Wolf Diaz recounts his life as friend and later servant to Maximilian, a strange stuffed animal with unusual powers and a gift for speaking in obtuse parables. As in Amberville, the residents of the city live in fear of death, or in this case, "the Chauffeurs," dark figures who arrive without warning and remove stuffed animals who have reached the end of their lives. New residents are manufactured by Magnus, their (for lack of a better word) god, and Maximilian, with his charisma and lack of guile, is starting to threaten the religious hierarchy that uses fear of Magnus to keep the populace of Mollisan Town in check.

"I intend to create a Retinue," said Chaffinch, "which is neither afraid to believe nor to listen. The stuffed animals in this city are suffering. You know that, Wolf, you know it well - the terrified pursuit of success and material happiness that never has an end. Weighed down by the dogmas of the church. The thought of the Chauffeurs, and that they might come any day whatsoever. Stuffed animals are to be pitied. And if we can give them solace, we must do so. If ten stuffed animals can repeat what I say, what Maximillian has taught us, we are ten times more effective."

Davys comes across heavy-handed at times, more so than Amberville, and oftentimes Lanceheim falls prey to speechifying to get its point across. Yet again, Davys uses the conceit of a world of stuffed animals to bring forth serious questions of faith, dogma, and politics that would weigh down more realistic portrayals. Lanceheim is a less satisfactory novel than Amberville, too episodic, but it still retains a startling power, particularly in its remarkable twists near the end. I look forward to the next novel Tourquai with particular delight.

VERDICT: MONKEY LIKES A LOT

THE INNOCUOUS

The Good Fairies of New York (Soft Skull Press, 2006)
by Martin Millar

"Right, you two," said Dinnie, stomping back into the room. "get out of here immediately and don't come back."

"What's the matter with you?" demanded Heather, shaking her golden hair. "Humans are supposed to be pleased, delighted and honored when they meet a fairy. They jump about going, 'A fairy, a fairy!' and laugh with pleasure. They don't demand they get out of their room immediately and don't come back."

"Well, welcome to New York," snarled Dinnie. "Now beat it."

Ah, whimsy. So easy to get tired of.

That's not fair, but sustaining whimsy over 200+ pages is hard. Far better if you taint your whimsy (yikes, now there's a sentence I've never typed before) with a healthy dapple of cynicism a la Vonnegut, or a dose of giddy mean-spiritedness a la Douglas Adams. You need balance, take the salt with the sweet.

Martin Millar almost pulls it off with The Good Fairies of New York. The cult urban fantasist (his Lonely Werewolf Girl sound likes a good time) sprinkles whimsy all throughout his tale of misplaced fairies making their way in the unScotlandlike boroughs of New York, but makes sure to add rude jokes, violence, obscenities, and various naughty bits to keep his ethereal heroines grounded in filthy reality. And it's fun, but too slight to resonate after completion.

The Good Fairies are Heather and Morag, thrown out of Scotland for inadvertently desecrating a fairy clan's sacred banner. Heather takes room with the disconcertingly awful Dinnie, "an overweight enemy of humanity [and] the worst violinist in New York," while Morag moves in across the street with Kerry, a free spirit suffering from Crohn's disease and attempting to complete a flower alphabet for a Community Arts award. There are also rock 'n' roll ghosts, Italian fairies, Chinese fairies, an awful version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, mythic flowers, horrible fiddle-playing, homeless people, and more subplots and diversions than you can shake a wand at.

It's all handled with a fair amount of aplomb; Millar is an amiable storyteller, and at its best Good Fairies reads like Neil Gaiman-lite, or a more sedate Terry Pratchett. But the story structure and its constant narrative momentum leave every character a cipher; I wanted to grow to like Dinnie, I understood that Kerry was adorable, but never did I actually appreciate them beyond their postings as serviceable plot movers. I can see that Millar is a talented fantasist, and I look forward to revisiting his imagination, but The Good Fairies is only diverting, too flimsy a tale to last.

VERDICT: MONKEY LIKES, BUT ONLY SO FAR AS THAT GOES

THE UGLY

The Fall (HarperCollins, 2010)
by Guillermo del Toro & Chuck Hogan

Well, 'ugly' might be overstating it. The Fall is fairly entertaining. But these vampires, man, they is ugly.

The direct sequel to last year's The Strain, The Fall is part two in author Chuck Hogan's and director Guillermo del Toro's Strain Trilogy, about a vampire epidemic taking over the world. In this world, vampires ain't the usual vaguely European dandies in capes, they are virus-laden monsters with a six-foot stinger that extends from their throats to grab and infect any person unlucky enough to be nearby. Continuing from the previous instalment, we join our hardy gang of vampire killers (including an epidemiologist, his young son, an elderly vampire hunter, and a New York exterminator who takes to monster slaying with ease) as they hunt down the Master, the one rogue vampire responsible for an outbreak which shows every possibility of destroying mankind permanently. Or at least moving us substantially down the food chain.

The authors tell their story well, jumping from attack to attack, but as with The Strain, the real problem is a lack of actual scares. The vampires lack personality, and the story moves forward so rapidly that there is no time to learn to empathize with the heroes. What we get is a fast-paced Hollywood monster movie from two men who should know better. Del Toro knows his monsters (Cronos, Mimic, Hellboy) but as he proved with Pan's Labyrinth, he can provide depth to join with his imagination to result in something truly spellbinding and wonderful (side note: del Toro's finally giving up on his adaptation of The Hobbit is likely a great loss to filmgoers, and his recent troubles in getting a Tom Cruise-starring adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness is a personal grievance). Hogan, in Prince of Thieves, proved himself an able craftsman who can weld interesting characters onto classic action scenarios. Working together, the result should be a near-classic, and its managing to be merely entertaining is a severe disappointment. I'm not turned off enough to not look for the finale in 2011, but The Fall is a wasted opportunity, a lark by two talents slumming it.

VERDICT: MONKEY THINKS IT'LL DO UNTIL THE NEXT DIVERSION, HEY, SOMETHING SHINY!

The Husk Chronicles, Episode One - ACCEPTANCE

My, Corey, what an intriguing post title.

And what a nauseating image (courtesy of Rob Sachetto's Zombie Daily blog).

What's it all about?

Well, you may have noticed a marked decline in the posting of posts on this here website. Frankly, I've been rather busy. The new job as publicist for Goose Lane Editions keeps my brain a'popping, leaving me with scant energy at the end of the workday. I do what I can, but I am at heart a lazy man who needs serious downtime.

And now, the posts may be coming with even less regularity, although I will do my best to update, review, and whine. Another element has been added to the mix, one which will definitely eat away at my time, time usually spent watching House or 30 Rock. You see, after years (no hyperbole here, folks, bloody years) of wait, and work, and false starts and restarts, the almost unthinkable has occurred. Corey Redekop, your one and only favourite writer of novels and blogs entitled Shelf Monkey, has had his sophomore novel accepted for publication.

Now, now, put away your wallet, stop searching online for the best price. It will be some time before Husk (that's the title) reaches shelves. We're talking 2012 here, so you have plenty of time to start putting away the pennies. Why, just saving a dime a day will put you so far ahead you'll be able to afford two copies. Good for you, good for me.

But this will mean much time and effort be placed into editing, which goes on and on and on, and as a result, less reviews. I will desperately try to keep all three of you still reading this sentence entertained and informed, but no guarantees.

And the image? Suffice to say, Husk is not (despite some pleas from earnest fans) a sequel to Shelf Monkey. It is, rather, what I refer to as the Great Canadian Zombie Novel (hence the image). I feel I'm on pretty solid ground with that claim; there simply haven't been that many Canadian zombie novels, certainly not written from the zombie's POV. There was a small segment of Max Brooks' World War Z set in Canada, and Joey Comeau's One Bloody Thing After Another had its fair share of undead mayhem, but that might be it. Except for Tony Burgess' Pontypool Changes Everything, a gutbusting masterpiece, but really so much, much more that a 'zombie novel.'

So, prep yourselves for the 2012 release of Husk. I'll be blogging updates on my progress, as well as other things that entertain/infuriate me.

And if you can't wait until 2012, consider voting for Shelf Monkey at the CBC Reads nomination page, on until October 26. It'll help pass the time.

Off Season by Jack Ketchum - thoughts

Have you ever felt you just missed the boat on an author? You know what I'm getting at, that one book that everyone raved about, but you simply couldn't fathom its popularity? Perhaps it's Yann Martel's Life of Pi, an amazing book that a surprising amount of people loathe. Or Margaret Atwood's The Tent, critically acclaimed yet snooze-inducing.

Well, Jack Ketchum's Off Season affects me in this way. I just don't get the hype. Stephen King raves on the cover, "If you read Off Season on Thanksgiving, you probably won't sleep until Christmas." No dice. I love Stephen, and will defend even his lesser efforts to the death, but his blurbs have led me down troubled paths before, most notably Bentley Little's The Walking, a novel that King apparently admires, but which I found to be a dreary, repetitive, and downright terrible, terrible novel. Really. I can't emphasize this enough. Just awful.

Off Season is not nearly that bad. It is a grimly effective horror novel with several moments of absolutely grosteque imagery. So no, it's not that bad. It's just not that good.

The plot harkens back to the glory days on grindhouse flicks, those cheaply-made exploitation movies with titles like I Spit on your Grave. A group of attractive young professionals arrive at a rented cottage for a weekend of relaxation. A hideous family of in-bred monstrosities attacks the group. Carnage ensues.

Right from the start, Ketchum is deliberately evoking the pulpy b-movie slasher films of the 1970s. These were usually terrible, but there were glimmers of true art and passion amidst the dreck. George Romero's classic Night of the Living Dead comes to mind, a nihilistic masterpiece that Off Season owes more than a nod to. He says as much in his afterword, a lengthy and entertaining discussion on the evolution of the novel, from its original and highly-neutered first publication in 1981, through its gaining cult status as a no-holds-barred horror epic, up to its ultimate re-release in its original, unexpurgated glory. It's strange that Ketchum, while noting Living Dead as an influence, never mentions Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, another low-budget gorefest that Ketchum's plot is almost an exact recycling of.

Now, there is nothing wrong with this sort of story. As Roger Ebert said in his droll and literate defense of George Romero's zombie epic (and the greatest zombie film of all time) Dawn of the Dead, "It is not depraved...it is about depravity." The same can be said of Off Season: it is definitely about depravity. Ketchum knows that we are all voyeurs, and we have a dark fascination with gore and subjects society considers taboo. He then proceeds to show us exactly what depravity is, in all its forms. Murder. Rape. Cannibalism. Mutilation. And it goes on like this.

Now, I'm no prude (although remarking on one's lack of prudity pretty much guarantees the moniker 'Prude' will be hung around the speaker's neck). I absolutely love the gritty low-budget movies that had the courage to go all the way with their ambitions. There is no better summation of the perils of consumerism than Dawn of the Dead (the original, not the surprisingly fun but lesser remake). The Hills Have Eyes, while not in the same league, does provide an in-depth satire on the bonds of family. Depravity can be a terrific entertainment, when done correctly. Look at Stephen King's Pet Semetary, a novel even he found too scary, and as depraved an examination of grief as there ever could be.

Ketchum's story does not have the heart of Pet Semetary. Nor does it have the resonating satire of Dawn. What it has, is gore. Buckets of it. People are skinned alive. Tongues are hacked off. Women are raped, dismembered, and disembowelled. No one gets off easy. No one is spared.

So, we've established that Off Season is ugly, and nihilistic, and bleak. So what? Such a vantage point does not make a novel worthless. But for all its in-your-faceness, there seems little point to all the blood-letting. That may also be Ketchum's point, that there is no point to it all, that life is brutish, short, and unpleasant. Mission accomplished.

But there's nothing beyond the ability to quease that makes Off Season anything more than moderately interesting. In the end, it's exactly like most of the grindhouse films it emulates. It's short, has flashes of originality, and vanishes from your memory once completed.