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UPDATED REVIEW

one late October night, heartbroken college student Ed decides to soothe his troubled soul by taking a long nighttime stroll to Dandi Donuts. and so begins an addiction. with each subsequent evening walk he learns more about the eerie, threatening, hypnotic underside of the sleepy small town of Wilmington. what lurks in Wilmington? well, let's see... a vindictive cycling senior, predators in a van with alluring bait, a sad and scary shut-in clown, cannibalistic homeless people lurking under bridges, a sociopath with the looks of a male model who fixates on Ed and his new lady, and an enticing young miss who makes a practice of sneaking into homes to make herself at home.

Richard Laymon, Richard Laymon! you wrote a good one! what a happy relief to finally find the book to justify my increasingly inexcusable desire to return to his trashy, sleazy worlds again and again. Night in Lonesome October is appealing and didn't inspire the usual guilt or feelings of squirmy dirtiness. Ed is a likeable (and increasingly feckless) hero who tries to do the right thing, nurses petty feelings of anger towards the lass who dumped him, is realistically horny (as opposed to the over-the-top uber-horniness of most Laymon teen protagonists), and his increasingly addictive behavior in exploring the disturbing underworld of the town around him is portrayed with interesting, often frustrating realism. and the ongoing motifs of nudity and voyeurism in Laymon's novels are handled with a lot more intelligence here - and in a way that rather expertly places the protagonist and the reader in the same shoes. very Hitchcock! very Blue Velvet!

the novel delivers genuine chills in set-piece after set-piece, from the creepy exploration of various silent homes to the image of a silent lumbering figure climbing over a fence on the edge of a ballpark at midnight to an increasingly threatening conversation with a lunatic to an ill-judged decision to have a little moonlit sex under a bridge. this was a genuinely tense novel.

it is also, per standard Laymon, a microscopic narrative. although it takes place over the course of several days, we are often in Ed's head on a minute-by-minute basis. although this can get a bit tedious at times, happily, it mainly works. it is all so you are there now.

i was also pleased at how Laymon handles his gay character. as is probably clear from my reviews, i'm a queer and so i am often rather thensitive to how queer supporting characters are portrayed. at first the hero's frenemy Kirkus was straight-up stereotype and i was annoyed. he's swishy and he speaks in some kind of affected Noel Coward voice and he is constantly predatory towards our hero's apparently hot little bod. but then we get Kirkus' horrifying backstory and i was rather blown away by just how tough Laymon decided to be when depicting how bad it can get for young queers. kudos! no punches pulled, and even better, the punches thrown land in surprisingly ambiguous and troubling places. and after this revelation... Kirkus is still the same pretentious, pathetic, and rather creepy guy, one who acts in an even more predatory style. it doesn't matter - Kirkus became real, to me and to Ed, and his move from asshole to assholish friend felt well-earned. oh and spoiler: he also saves the day, so there's that.

okay this review is really too long for its enjoyable but minor subject matter, so i'll just close out by saying that if you are a Laymon fan and if any of the above makes you think that this atypical Laymon offering lacks the typical Laymon excesses of torture, rape, sadism, and excessive blood-is-everywhere type violence... well, i guess don't worry. the climax has all of that, sicko.

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YE OLDE PLACEHOLDER REVIEW

'tis the season...

13 TALES OF TERROR: BOOK 12

i had a dream last night... a dream that Richard Laymon actually wrote a good book. not just a fun and pulpy trash rollercoaster that made me feel ashamed and dirty afterwards, but a novel of value. eerie, unpredictable, and surprisingly thoughtful. a protagonist who actually felt real and a journey that was strange and disturbing and grotesque... but somehow not cheap. not typical Laymon. it was not just a dream - it was a nightmare! a beautiful nightmare. i woke up tangled in my sweat-soaked sheets, confused and off-balance, wanting to dive back into the dream and finish that strange trip. but instead i had a cigarette; it's best to draw out these kinds of pleasures.

now here are some special Halloween visuals for your viewing pleasure:

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