The Beast House

I’m a fan of the late, great Richard Laymon , and I just finished (re-)reading The Beast House, the second in his Beast House chronicles and a sequel to The Cellar. In fact, The Beast House starts mere months after the conclusion of The Cellar.

If you liked the first part of the trilogy, you should like the second, since it is virtually a fleshed-out retelling of the same plot. This sounds like a denunciation, but Laymon’s directness of style and storytelling make this worth reading even if you’ve already read the first one. I won’t talk too much about the specifics of the story, since that would be a possible spoiler for those who haven’t read the first book. I will say you learn the fates of the surviving characters from the first book, and it all leads to a more final resolution, although I suppose not too final, since there is a third volume, The Midnight Tour. All are available from Leisure Books, and at your local reading emporium.
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Triage

Triage is three novellas built around a single premise: A woman receives a phone call at her place of work “I’m coming to get you” and then a man comes in and starts shooting everyone. Each story has a different, top-of-the-line author, the late Richard Laymon, Edward Lee, and Jack Ketchum. Any one of those names is good enough to persuade me to buy a book, so all three together had me very eager to read it, even though the reviews I had read were mostly negative.

The first story, Laymon’s, was the most straight-forward in its execution. I would call it good, solid Laymon, nothing spectacular by his standards, but certainly well worth reading, with a typical Laymon twist in the middle.

The longest story was Edward Lee’s, which surprisingly used a science fiction setting, which also made it the widest deviation of the three from what is expected. I started out irritated at this. I was looking to read a horror story, not science fiction, but I was won over by the end. Edward Lee is an inventive writer, and uses the science fiction milieu for a bit of social commentary, well in keeping with science fiction traditions. The reveal at the end will probably delight some readers and annoy others, but I liked it.

Jack Ketchum’s story is the last and shortest, and he, too plays around with the format somewhat. This is one of his Stroup stories, and adventure of his hard-to-like recurring character. I thought the story was more of a character vignette than a full-fledged story, but Ketchum’s gift is characterization, and this is a good example of his talents.

So my verdict is to ignore any harsh reviews, and if you like Ketchum, Lee or Laymon (and who doesn’t?) pick up Triage.
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To Wake The Dead

To Wake The Dead (known as Amara in many markets) is a posthumously-published Richard Laymon novel about a resurrected mummy on the loose. I was looking forward to it, as a mummy has been a totemic horror icon since the release of the 1932 version of The Mummy, but one that rarely pops up in fiction.

(Students of human behavior talk about our Great White Whales – tasks we can’t complete or goals we can’t achieve. From a reading point of view, my Great White Whale is Anne Rice’s The Mummy. I am not a fan of Ms. Rice. I found Interview With The Vampire to be worthwhile, but the rest of her work I’ve read, I find unbearably awful. I also blame her for the trend of vampires in entertainment talking like freshmen in Philosophy 101. Nonetheless, a friend gave me The Mummy when it was published, almost twenty years ago, and I’ve tried to read it ever since. I’ve made at least six determined efforts to read it, and never made it to page 100. I will read it one day, perhaps post-senility.)

To Wake The Dead has a simple plot, although there is a complicated structure. The basic story is familiar: Amara, a wife of a Pharoah, is mummified along with her baby, cursed to live eternally. The protective seal is broken, and she goes on a rampage to find her baby, which was burned 150 years earlier. Carnage ensues.

I’m a big fan of Laymon. He is one of the most underappreciated authors ever to work in horror. But, while the book is entertaining, this isn’t anywhere near one of his best. There are far to many subplots: People held in bizarre sexual slavery, a homeless woman stalking a cop’s girlfriend, the custodian of the estate which owned Amara’s sexual peccadilloes, and so on. This was published posthumously, and you have to wonder if there would have been more substantial editing/rewriting had Laymon lived. There have been rumors that Dean Koontz, who was a friend of Richard Laymon, and who writes the introduction to the book, may have done some work on it. (Part of the story is told from the viewpoint of a dog, which Koontz readers will recognize as a trademark.) I have no idea if this is true, but if so, part of the problem might be their styles just don’t mix. Still it was a fun read, just not up to Laymon’s usual high standards.

The Cellar

The Cellar, first published in 1980, is a story of horror on two levels. The first is a semi-supernatural form of terror not that uncommon to the genre. The second, and more chilling, is a human form of horror that is frightening because it is plausible.

The more human terror begins with Donna and her 12-year-old daughter Sandy. Donna’s ex-husband, Roy, is released from prison after serving six years for raping Sandy. Donna understands what this means, and grabs Sandy and flees. Roy follows, intent on punishing his ex-wife and daughter for sending him to prison, leaving dead bodies in his wake, and along the way, kidnapping a pre-teen girl, who he graphically abuses. Donna’s flight ends in Malcasa, home of the legendary Beast House, which is said to be plagued by a monster that kills anyone who is in the house after dark. Donna’s path intersects that of a protector, Judgement Rucker, who has been hired by a survivor of the Beast House to kill the monster within.

This was Richard Laymon’s first published story, and is supposedly his best-selling book. The violence and depiction of the sexual abuse are still extreme for today, and must have been mind-blowing in 1980. For all its graphic nature, the story seems a bit familiar, and you have a clear sense of where it’s heading – until the last chapter, when all preconceptions are dashed, and there is a shocking, unanticipated conclusion. There the real genius of Richard Laymon, one of the genre’s great writers, is revealed.

Horror: The Best 100 Books puts The Cellar at #83 on its list. If anything, it is underrated. This was the first in Laymon’s Beast House Chronicles, followed, in order, by The Beast House, The Midnight Tour, and Friday Night in the Beast House.

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Among The Missing

If you have ever read anything on my site, you know I am a huge fan of the late Richard Laymon, one of the great underappreciated writers. Fortunately for me, Laymon was quite prolific, and there are a number of his books I missed, which I am now able to read for the first time. The most recent of these is Among The Missing.

This is one of Laymon’s more crime-oriented novels. There are no supernatural elements involved in the plot, although it is filled with trademark Laymon sex and violence.

Bass and his girlfriend Faye go canoeing. As they are walking to the river, they happen upon a naked man and woman lying on a blanket. Although they try not to disturb them, the man wakes up, runs to the river, and swims to the other side. With the woman’s head. This begins a fast-moving story which sees the local Sheriff and his deputy/daughter-in-law attempt to solve the murder. All evidence points to Merton, a drug dealer who gets off on raping young boys, but there are characteristic Laymon twists in the plot. There are a couple of small plot holes, but you probably won’t notice them until after the fact. As with everything Laymon writes, this is recommended.

Castaways

In 2001, the horror genre lost, at an untimely age, one of its greatest lights when Richard Laymon succumbed to a heart attack. Laymon never really got the recognition from the general audience he deserved in life, but was, after Stephen King, arguably the most influential writer of recent times in terms of his impact on other writers. To honor his memory, Cemetery Dance commissioned an anthology called In Laymon’s Terms, where writers would write about their experiences with Mr. Laymon, and author stories that would be an homage to him. Due to production delays, In Laymon’s Terms has not yet been published, but horror writer Brian Keene has expanded his entry in the book (the story can also be read in his excellent collection Fear of Gravity) into a full length novel, Castaways.

Generally when writers try to write in another writer’s style, the results are less than sparkling, as they bury their own voice in an attempt to copy another author. That isn’t the case here. Keene has managed to blend his own style with Laymon’s themes to produce a book which is among Keene’s very best, and would rank among Laymon’s very best as well.

The novel focuses on a reality TV show, which is more or less Survivor, named Castaways. A number of people are in the early stages of a competition where they are marooned on an uninhabited Pacific island, competing to see who the last one left will be. Unbeknownst to them, there will be a more challenging, real-life competition, as the island isn’t so uninhabited. A vicious race of man-like creatures lives in the caves on the island. At the same time a powerful typhoon washes over the island, the creatures attack the contestants, desiring them for food, and for breeding purposes. The contestants pretend game of survival turns all too real. Instead of fighting to see who will be sthe last one left to claim a million dollars, they are fighting to see who will survive.

There is a connection to Laymon’s work (the creatures seem to be the same from the Beast House trilogy), as well as connective bits to Keene’s other work, and to H. P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu. You don’t have to have any knowledge of any of these other stories, as Castaways stands on its own just fine, but these things are an added treat for the hard-core fan.

Castaways, which will be published at the end of the month by Leisure, is visceral, exciting, and flows amazingly well. If you are already a Keene fan, you certainly won’t want to miss this book. If you are already a fan, this would be a great place to start.

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The Woods Are Dark

Although he has never been as well known outside the horror genre as Stephen King or Dean Koontz, Richard Laymon has always been a big name to horror fans. Unfortunately, due to his lack of crossover appeal, Many of Laymon’s books have been out-of-print for quite a while, and some were never published in the United States. Laymon, who died young of a heart attack in 2001, believed partial responsibility for this lay in the treatment of his second novel, The Woods Are Dark.

In was 1981, at the early beginnings of the horror boom. Stephen King had become widely popular, and publishing houses were looking for horror writers to cash in on the surge in the genre’s popularity. Richard Laymon was one of these writers. He published his first book, The Cellar, in 1980, and felt the follow-up, The Woods Are Dark, would be the book that found a broader audience. But when he delivered the manuscript to Warner Books, they wanted drastic changes made, to lessen the amount of sex and violence. Although Laymon disagreed, he was young and went along with the re-write, all the while feeling it weakened the store. When the second proof was delivered, he was horrified to find the book had been re-written and butchered by someone connected with Warners. Subplots were destroyed, the timeline was tangled and there were many mistakes. Warners also told him it was too late to make further changes. Then they slapped a hideous foil cover on the book and released it, and it promptly flopped. Laymon’s career never regained its momentum in the United States (although he was big in the United Kingdom), and for the rest of his life he was a cult author.

Laymon always said the original version of The Woods Are Dark could never be recovered or re-written, that the material that comprised it was too scattered or destroyed. After his death, however, his daughter Kelly undertook the task of piecing together the original manuscript, finding pages in various places and assembling it like a jigsaw puzzle. At the same time, Leisure Books was in the process of re-publishing Laymon’s work. Everything came together at the right time, and this month, Leisure published Kelly Laymon’s reconstruction of The Woods Are Dark, the first mass publication for the American market.

The Woods Are Dark was an ideal follow-up for the Cellar, as it carries over many of the same themes. Travelers come to a creepy small town in California, are abducted by the locals (who are all in on it), and taken out into the woods, where they are eaten by a tribe of feral people called the Krulls. These periodic sacrifices keep the Krulls from troubling the townspeople.

In the book, two separate groups, two girls traveling together, and a family, are kidnapped and tied to trees in the woods. Before they can meet their fate, they are freed, and embark on a harrowing attempt at escape through the dark woods. The entire book takes place over the course of one night, a favorite device of Laymon’s, and the action is non-stop from beginning to end. There are a couple of instances where characters behave illogically, but that isn’t enough to lessen the suspense.

If you are a Laymon fan, you’ll definitely want to read this. If you aren’t, this would be a good place to start.

One Rainy Night

One of the tragedies of the horror field was the untimely death of Richard Laymon. The one bright spot is he was so prolific, all but the most fervent fans can still discover unread books. One of those, to me, was One Rainy Night.

Laymon was one of those authors that never got his just recognition. Although extremely popular in the rest of the English-speaking world, only about half of his forty novels had been published in the U.S. before his untimely death of a heart attack at 53, and most if not all of those were paperback originals. Still, if you like horror novels and haven’t tried Laymon. You are in for a treat. His books have been called “Stephen King without a conscience”. Leisure’s horror line seems to be in the process of bringing most if not all of his books into print in the U.S.

One Rainy Night is not one of his best, but is a solidly entertaining book. Think of it as a written version of a B movie. In a small town, a young black man is abducted by three white thugs for the crime of dating a white girl. He is tortured, then tied to the goalposts on the football field and burned to death. The next night, an inexplicable black rain begins to fall on the town. Everyone who is caught into it is transformed into a homicidal maniac. The bulk of the book is three parallel stories of people trying to survive and figure out what’s going on. It is a not-stop action ride.

The chief flaws, in my opinion, of the book are the ending, where a sudden answer is presented and Boom! it’s over, and a change in the effect of the rain at the end (when the heroes get infected, they are able to control themselves for no good reason). Still, I enjoyed the book. Laymon rarely disappoints.