Up late talking games & writing? You're...

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Books: Just finished reading Off Season by Jack Ketchum last night. I hate to admit it, but I hadn't really heard of Ketchum until sometime last year or so. After doing a little digging, it seems that the guy is pretty highly regarded in most circles, and being the Horror enthusiast that I am, his first book made it into my to-read pile pretty quickly.
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Off Season is about a woman and a group of her friends who rent a cabin on the coast of Maine to get away from the city for a weekend. Unknown to them, there is a local legend about a group of people who were left stranded on a small island offshore, and became feral cannibals. Naturally this legend has some fact behind it, and when these cannibals leave the island… well, let's just say that “bad things happen”.
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At the back of the book, the author has some notes that talk about Off Season’s first printing. Evidently, the novel was poised to become something of a blockbuster until the author and publisher started clashing about the violent and explicit content in the story, in addition to certain story events that the publisher wanted changed. The author’s description of the struggles he had in bringing a book to shelves that remained true to his vision is quite interesting, and equally telling. I'm glad that I never read the censored version, since the copy I have (the author’s unedited cut) was a great read, and the ending was something I could absolutely get behind. I don't want to spoil things for anyone, but the philosophy and the message Ketchum was trying to get across in his story is quite similar to something I've been trying to get across in Speaking in Forked Tongues.
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Ketchum’s prose is polished and evocative, and he has a real talent for communicating just the right bits of information in order to give the reader a clear sense of personality and purpose in a very short time. The pace of the story was quite rapid, and I appreciated that there was very little fat to slog through.
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Interestingly, I didn't find the graphic content to be particularly, well… graphic. I mean, blood is certainly spilled and there are recipes for preparing human flesh, but I wouldn't say that it was any more extreme than a dozen other novels I've read. I find it curious that a publisher would buy a book like this and then try to clean it up so much. I certainly don't envy Ketchum his struggles, though I am heartened to see that he eventually had his way and reprinted the book the way he wanted it done in the first place. Overall, it was a very entertaining and satisfying read, and I look forward to catching up with the rest of his work.
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An interesting sidenote: I found Off Season (1981) to have quite a few things in common with Peter Benchley’s The Island (1979)… I wouldn't say that they're the same novel (and Ketchum’s is certainly the more intense of the two) but a lot of the ideas and themes about small colonies of people being stranded mirror each other. If you read and liked one, I would definitely recommend the other.
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Games: It may have taken me a few years, but I am quite proud to say that I finally earned every achievement in one of my favorite XBLA games, Wik and the Fable of Souls.
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I beat the game in just a few days after I originally downloaded it, but finishing the story mode with 100% crystal collection and finishing the challenge mode were both pretty tall orders. The developers were more than a little sadistic in both cases, and there were long stretches of time when I simply had to put the game aside and not play for while so that my rage gauge could cool off and get back into the blue zone. Still, I never gave up and would come back to it periodically, and although I will admit that there were several times when I felt like it was never going to happen, I finally got past the few sticking points that had been ticking me off and finished the entire game completely.
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It's extremely rare that I take the time or put out the effort to finish every last bit of any game that I play, but I have such enthusiasm for the title and I think it's such a fantastic, quirky gem that I couldn't sleep well at night knowing that there was content left to conquer. If for some strange reason you haven't tried it yet, I strongly encourage you to at least download the free demo and give it a whirl… there are very few games that require such split-second precision and manual dexterity these days, and of those that do, even fewer have the charm and appeal to make it worth putting up with the spikes in difficulty. Wik is definitely one of the rare ones.
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Now, on to completing CarneyVale Showtime…
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