The Off Season

Time moves differently in Point Vestal, a sleepy northwestern town, where ghosts from the late 19th century roam the coastal streets as freely as the town’s living inhabitants. But underneath the touristy allure of this commingled past and present lies a creeping darkness. August Starling, a decadent (and dead) crime baron, has a plan for Point Vestal—whose magical nature has become a haven for sinners fleeing their crimes. And the only ones who can stop Starling are the town’s newest residents: a defrocked Episcopalian priest and a talking cat. The Off Season is an effusive meditation on the nature of the fantastic, by a writer The Atlanta Constitution calls “a lasting voice in modern American literature.”

Amazon.com Review

"I wanted to write a book that . . . my hero, Mark Twain, would enjoy reading," says Jack Cady. And indeed, this novel is so full of biting humor and hilarious fatalism--not to mention a century's worth of spirits out and about in a small coastal town--that you'll come to believe that somewhere Twain's ghost is laughing as he reads it. A few hints at the novel's riches: a defrocked hippie priest who plays the violin for his multilingual cat; blood-choked screams that people set their watches by; a tourist trade selling Victorian funerals with all the trappings; an evil that twists and whirls like red shadows in a room where a man dances with a corpse. Cady has spun a great yarn, with all the proper Victorian sentiments: guilt, remorse, melancholy, pride in duty.

From Publishers Weekly

In this satirical and elusive broadside at what he admits is a version of his hometown of Port Townsend, Wash., Cady (Street), who's won both a Nebula and a World Fantasy Award for his dark fantasy yarns, creates a curious pastiche that echoes unequal parts of The Divine Comedy, Alice in Wonderland, Pilgrim's Progress and Don Quixote. The operative conceit here is that five citizens of "Point Vestal"?a bookseller, a bartender, an antiques expert, a retired pastor and a newspaper editor?are writing this book, a history of the town. But that's not an easy task, since Point Vestal is a very strange place, overpopulated by ghosts and refusing to be fixed in time: the narrative opens in a year that is both 1973 and 1893. This blurring of dates honors the cataclysmic year that Joel-Andrew, a defrocked Episcopalian priest, came to town, eventually to confront August Starling, the local reincarnation of evil. Featuring a disenfranchised physician, a dancing cat fluent in seven languages, a magical Presbyterian Parsonage (with an all-seeing tower, a personality and an unruly wanderlust) and many extras, the story line winds its eccentric way toward a microcosmic Armageddon. While Cady's first three novels?The Well, The Jonah Watch and McDowell's Ghost?remain his best known, they are also his most traditional. His subsequent experimentation with horror forms, as in this caustic fable, may not win him a huge new readership, but it is admirable and worthy of note. Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This offbeat, whimsical tale recounts the history of Point Vestal, a Pacific Northwest coastal town where ghosts walk the streets in broad daylight. Joel-Andrew, a defrocked Episcopal priest from San Francisco, and Obed, his dancing cat, are good-guy newcomers to 1970s Point Vestal. Late-19th-century crime baron and pervert August Starling, now a ghost, plots to turn Point Vestal into a tourist trap and retirement mecca for sinners seeking eternal life. A large cast of characters, both living and otherwise, plus repeated shifts in time between the 19th and 20th centuries, all add texture (or confusion) to what, in the closing pages, proves a literal Armageddon, with God and Satan facing each other on the streets of Point Vestal. By the author of Inagehi (LJ 4/15/94) and several other novels of the supernatural, this present effort is probably best suited for larger popular or genre fiction collections.?James B. Hemesath, Adams State Coll. Lib., Alamosa, Col.Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

In Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim comes "unstuck in time," living and reliving the various stages of his life in no particular order. In The Off Season, this unsettling phenomenon happens to the entire population of Point Vestal, Washington, an isolated village on a bluff in the Strait of Juan de Fuca near Seattle. The novel opens by introducing the eccentric characters who inhabit the village, slowly revealing that some of these people are either ghosts or the revivified bodies of the formerly dead. Into Point Vestal comes a defrocked preacher and prophet, who, with his dancing, multilingual cat, inhabits the Parsonage, a large Victorian house that likes to move itself around the village. The preacher innocently sparks what turns out to be an apocalyptic battle for the soul of the village by bringing back to life the most evil man who ever lived there. This battle and its stunning results are chillingly related by this Nebula Award^-winning storyteller. With elements of fantasy, science fiction, and even Northern Exposure at its best, this novel has something to appeal to nearly all readers. George Needham

About the Author

Jack Cady teaches at Pacific Lutheran University.

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