[witt19800]

So I almost finished Off Season by Jack Ketchum last night. The first chapter sucked me in. Remember the X-Files? How they would always begin the episode with a murder? Hook you in before the opening credits? When books do that, it's effective. So I was hooked.

I like the excessive violence and sex. But alas, I'm 31 and the verisimilitude meter is much higher now than it was before. When the main action sequence occurred, I found that I enjoyed reading it. But I couldn't go on afterwards. The believability factor was gone. Also, Jack Ketchum's voice as a writer really changed in that action sequence. No longer did I feel the cool assured hand of narrative authority. I felt like his writing came apart, lost focus and sounded a little juvenile. I simply lost interest.

Also, I'm not so sure about these long character developing passages. David Mamet says that all stories follow the structure of the joke. The punchline of the joke is the whole point, and any extra information that is not relevant to the punch line should be cut. I really appreciate Ketchum's attempt at character development, but it really slowed things down. And when the character was killed off, I didn't feel empathy for her, I felt that I had wasted time empathizing with someone who was simply meant to be killed off. In the joke, the punchline is the laugh. In horror, the punchline is the scare. GET TO THE SCARE. This is not Dostoevsky. Know the goal of your genre, and get to the point. Brevity is your friend.

I also think that I will look for something written in the first person. I've read the pros and cons of first versus third person and it comes down to taste.

With me, third person constantly reminds me that some fool author is spinning me a yarn, and it breaks my suspension of disbelief. Also, when he takes me into description of the killer's activities, he ruins the killer's mystery. And humanizes him. And both things diminish FEAR, which IS THE POINT OF HORROR. There's no shame in this. You do not need to "deepen" the work by borrowing techniques from other genre's. I love relationships and character development, but when I want that stuff I'll read the plays of Arthur Miller. I won't pick up Off Season by Jack Ketchum. Respect the genre.

First person has an immediacy, fuck "intimacy", it has an IMMEDIACY that third person does not have. Many novels will use first person in the first chapter to hook you in. They know that you're at the bookstore with ten thousand other books and they want to prevent you from putting the book down. So you buy the book, and lo and behold, you get home and chapter two is written in boring ol' third person. Well folks, why don't you just KEEP THE STORY IN FIRST PERSON THE WHOLE WAY THROUGH, AND I WON'T PUT THE BOOK DOWN AT ALL. You think that's implausible? Steven Pressfield told you the entire military campaign of Alexander the Great in first person. The novel's called Virtues of War and you should read it. Believe me it can be done.