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Oh, boy. I may get in trouble for this one.
Richard Laymon was a nice guy and an effective storyteller and a hugely popular President of the Horror Writers Association; everybody was saddened when he died, especially since his newest novel in print at the time, THE TRAVELLING VAMPIRE SHOW, looked to be a deserved breakout success for him.
I speak now as a guy who liked that book, and read some of his others with equal appreciation and enjoyment. Even so, I may receive some negative feedback for now speaking ill of the dead.
I can't help it.
Because THE STAKE is one of Laymon's best-known books, and I just finished it.
I can only report that it's one of the dumbest things I've ever read in my life.
Nothing in it bears any resemblance to the way human beings act, or the way they take traumatic experiences, or the way they respond to insane circumstances.
We tend to be tough on characters in horror stories, who sometimes seem very slow to realize the trouble they're in. Sometimes, they seem downright retarded. The explanation is usually that the characters are in fact acting normally for folks who DON'T KNOW they're constructs in a horror story.
THE STAKE is filled with characters who not only seem to know that they're in a horror story, but who in all possible cases go well out of their way to cooperate with any authorial need to place them deeper in deep doo-doo. They WANT to be in a horror story. They WANT the danger to build around them. They seem to want it above and aboard all other human considerations.
They're supposed to be likeable suburbanites, but they're nutsoids. I wouldn't shout a warning if I saw a truck bearing down on any one of them. The plot: A midlist horror writer and his wife, and their friends the couple next door (an aliterate jokester and his sexy wife the writer has a secret crush on), go out for a drive in the desert. They decide to explore a ghost town. They break into a ramshackle hotel and start to climb the stairs. In this, they show the first minor stupidity, in that it never occurs to them that ancient, rotting stairs might not hold their weight; but that, at least, is the kind of stupidity real people might actually demonstrate. And, of course, the stairs collapse beneath the writer's wife. She is not seriously hurt, but in freeing her they discover, buried beneath the stairs, a coffin bearing the mummified corpse of a young girl with a stake in her heart. Aliterate friend says, hey, you're a horror writer, you should write a book about this, we'll split the money. Also stupid, but, alas, well within every writer's experience.
They go home, deciding not to tell anybody they found the body.
I will point out, here, that at least some of the crazed and illogical behavior that follows seems to derive from the telepathic influence of the corpse; the writer, in particular, does stuff so removed
from normal human behavior that it's clear Laymon intended us to see his actions in this light. However, in order to take anything that follows seriously, we must also believe that the malign influence also affects Aliterate friend and the wives.
Onward. Back home, midlist horror writer is engaged in doing emergency repair work on galleys wrecked beyond all recognition by an overzealous copyeditor who essentially re-wrote the book for him. His aliterate friend keeps harping on how rich they're both going to get from this book. Writer ignores his contracted book, noodles on a non-fiction piece about the vampire, finds the chapters flying by, thinks that his friend might actually have something. They decide that they're going to return to the ghost town, retrieve the coffin, stash it with body in the attic, and conclude the book with the big dramatic moment when midlister pulls out the stake.
This is, by the way, a rural town the family moved to after a bad experience in LA. Research in the library reveals that back in 1967 a bunch of local girls were killed by a madman who thought them vampires. They were, in fact, staked. The writer thinks it odd that this never made the national news at the time. I find it impossible that a horror writer for godsake, moving to a peaceful small town where this would remain notorious local history for decades, would fail to already know about it. But never mind, it's a footnote that nobody's ever talked about, even though a few days of research in the local papers is enough to build up a pretty substantial case against a crazed loner known to live in the vicinity of the very same ghost town where midlister and his buddies found the body.
Midlister and friend go back to the ghost town, get the coffin, and stash it in the basement of midlister's house. They are quite gay about all the money they're going to make with this true-crime book (which will of course require midlister to publicly admit he keeps mummified corpses in his basement). Midlister, meanwhile, develops a detailed, passionate crush on "Bonnie," the murdered teen from 1967 he has identified as the corpse in question. This is DEFINITELY vampiric influence, and is clearly intended to be so. But the insane behavior continues to predominate, doesn't it?
UNRELATED IN ANY WAY TO ANY OF THIS, the midlister's daughter, Lorne, is unknowingly threatened by an insane teacher who has already killed one girl and her family and now wants to come after her. He in fact rapes her one night from the Dad is at home communing with the mummy.
Unrelated, mind you.
The Dads have both gone out into the desert and had a major battle with the crazy guy who staked Bonnie way back when. He has fired his bow and arrow; they have fired guns. Our writer hero even shoots the guy three times (though he will survive it). They are still openly talking about finishing
the book.
Traumatized daughter, fresh from the rape she has not told her parents about, goes downstairs in the middle of the night and finds her Dad standing in a trance before the corpse, telling it how much he loves it. She wakes him up. He sorta bashfully explains the whole story up until now. The wives
also find out, and are upset, but eventually come around to the men's way of thinking, agreeing to let things continue as they have been until the stake can be pulled from the dead girl's chest.
Traumatized daughter, after being raped and brutalized and having her life and the lives of her family threatened by the same guy she has just figured out killed the family of her classmate, is NOT driven totally around the bend loopy by the sight of her Dad the necrophiliac. NOT AT ALL. She UNDERSTANDS that part; it's just crazy old Dad. The wives, upon learning what their husbands have been up to, do NOT pack their bags and go running off in search of saner pastures. NOT AT ALL. They all decide, yes, pulling that stake will be a good thing, we will all help you videotape it. And when the teacher, who the father does not know to be an insane sadistic rapist in his own right, drops by out of what he professes to be mere concern for a good student missing a day of school, it makes PERFECT sense for the father to, on impulse, tell this teacher everything he's been up to, and invite him to join the unstaking ceremony. It makes perfect sense for even THAT nutjob, staying in character, to say, sure, I'll help you pull the stake from the chest of the dead body you just happen to have in the basement, and yes, I'll even hold the crossbow, to fire a shaft into its chest in case she sits up and starts biting necks.
All this goes without mentioning the school hood, who Lane basically hires to kill the teacher, the attack of the crazy hermit who staked Bonnie in the first place, and of course, the freakin' vampire herself, who does in fact rise, to bizarre effect.
Horror fiction is baroque, folks. It thrives on extremes of behavior.
But the people who populate it should at least be recognizable as people.
These are not people. They're not normal people, and they don't even work, on any level, as deranged people. Nothing they do, in this book, makes any freakin' sense whatsoever, NOT EVEN if you posit that they're all under the influence of the vampire from page one. It's the Three Stooges phenomenon all over again, writ large, and if you want that one explained to you, well, just consider that every Three Stooges short begins with them holding down some kind of established job, that they've managed to hold down up until the half hour chunk of their lives we get to see, where via totally lunatic behavior they wreck everything in sight. The Three Stooges phenomenon is that they managed to keep everything more or less organized BEFORE now, and from what we see of their behavior, it seems inexplicable. (The same seems true of Laurel and Hardy; if Laurel burns down Hardy's home, the only real surprise, in that half hour, is that it hasn't happened before.) Since the people in this particular book are ALSO uncontrollable loons, who only mishandle everything in their lives during these five hundred (!) pages, the surprise is an equivalent: why haven't they done so before? Are we really expected to believe that they've always been competent and rational in every
way, before page one, and that they all had the same nerve-gas-laden paint chip consomme for lunch?
The surprise, as stated, is that this guy also wrote good books. It's a mixed blessing that I read a couple of those first. It was a good thing because, on the basis of this one, I can't imagine ever working up the faith I would have needed to investigate those others. It was a bad thing because
he had worked up enough good will to keep me reading, even as capacity for suspension of disbelief went the way of the Cro-Magnon.
Gaaahhh...ATC
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