Richard Laymon Month: Allhallow's Eve REVIEWED!

And so it begins!
The first book of as-many-as-I-can for the month of November, written by my all around favorite author.

I chose to either re-read books I haven't read in a very, VERY long time or read some things I had never gotten around to reading.

This is the latter of the two, a book untouched by thine hands.

Well, not really, because my copy is part of the Richard Laymon collection that Headline Books, out of the UK, released in the mid 2000s. These serve as an omnibus of his work, containing two and sometimes three of his books in one affordable package. Worth a purchase if you're looking to beef up your collection without spending much.

The other book here is Night Show, which is probably my least favorite Laymon. It's boring and bland, rushed in it's climax and far too similar to the marginally better Out Are The Lights, written shortly before it.

Now reading Allhallow's Eve, I think Laymon was simply in a rut.

These three books were written around the same time according to his incredibly informative autobiography-reference book hybrid, A Writers Tale (A must read, if you can get your hands on a copy). And they all suffer the same kind of paint-by-numbers storytelling, with little of the elements that make me enjoy Laymon's work so much. They are OK, passable timewasters, but by a thin margin.

Perhaps, I am biased because he's my favorite author otherwise. On his A-Game he writes some of the best schlock around, his books reading like a great Horror film you missed in it's VHS release decades ago.

At his worst, they read like Lifetime movies with a little sex and gore to zest it up for a horror reader. A real bummer that this is one of those, to start off my month entirely dedicated to him.

I chose to have Allhallow's Eve kick off the month of Laymon reads because it was actually Halloween night when making the decision. I presented my wife with a few of the options to get me started and she felt it was a no-brainer. Really, it was.

Niether of us could foresee that it would be a lousy book.

The plot is pretty thin. Eric is a high school kid who has it rough. He gets bullied by his peers, the staff at school make him do push-ups in piss and his dad walked out on him.

Eric's Mom is hooking up with a new guy, a cop named Sam, who is investigating some murders in a local house of urban legend, Sherwood House.

Eric's pissed about all of the above and concocts a plan to take care of em all. On Allhallow's Eve, of course. A limited amount of blood and guts fly, a plot-twist that you saw coming from page 10 goes over like a fart in a hot tub, and the book abruptly ends.

That's it.

At a brisk 240 pages, this doesn't really have time or mind to be as slow as it is, needlessly wrapped up in the melodrama of relationships with characters that have conflicts that never really get resolved.

Little in the way of horror happens until the last few chapters, just about 20 pages remaining.

What does occur is pretty horrific and demented, hinting at what Laymon was actually made of, but it's really too-little too-late to make the book worthy of much praise.

The book reminds me of something Christopher Pike, Diana Hoh or R.L. Stine would write, with a bit more sex and gore. In other words, it works fine if it's your Fisher Price My-First-Horror-Novel, as those books served many of us, but once you've read a few, you've read 'em all.

It's a pretty dreadful start to Laymon month, but I am still hopeful, as this is the guy who wrote The Cellar, my overall favorite book of all time.

Needless to say, this one wasn't doing it for me at all.

I'm giving it a 2/5, just squeaking over a 1 on account of a gentle splash of some good old fashioned messed up shit that Laymon is famous for.

Next up is either Beware (another unread by me) or Midnight's Lair, read so long ago, I can hardly remember it. Haven't decided yet, but I hope it fairs better than this stinker.