Richard Laymon Month: Midnight's Lair REVIEWED.

After coming of the just barely luke-warm Allhallow's Eve, I needed something to guarantee me a good time...a reminder of why Laymon is my favorite author, something that illustrates the talent the author had to turn out books that zipped by; no nonsense b-movies in prose format with the blood, guts and bizarro factor blaring at top notch.

A reason why I'm doing a Richard Laymon month in the first place.

Midnight's Lair is one of the first books I read by the author, borrowing it from my local library in high school under the pen name, Richard Kelly. I didn't even know who Laymon was at that point, much less that he wrote it.

15 year old me thought this book was the bee's knees, thinking it was all I had ever wanted in a book. And to my chagrin, I couldn't find another Richard Kelly book in the library, nor did I care that much...let's be honest, I was in high school. As much as I dug books then, the 15 year old conscience was far more concerned with more primal hobbies, by default.

I hadn't read it since, Laymon month giving me the opportunity to go back and read some of his work that I may approach with a more refined pallet.

Refined pallet. Snicker-Snicker.

I don't look at it as God's gift to literature at this point, but it's very close to Laymon being on his A-GAME. It has all of the elements that make Laymon reads great,  my favorite ingredients are present in all their glory here in particular.

The story is told with a great sense of urgency, a non-stop progression to the inevitable end. A large group of tourists get trapped in a cave with a small society of cannibalistic mutants, the by-product of years of torture, abuse and murder by the ownership of the resort-hotel. The results are the nasty stuff you've come to expect when cracking a Laymon open.

The biggest thing that stood out to me while reading this, was the similarities to some of Laymon's earlier work, namely The Cellar and The Woods Are Dark. We've got the tourist trap with a horrific monster(s), being capitalized by an evil proprietor. We've got the clueless, trapped group of dumb-dumbs treading into no-man's-land with a bird's eye view of the oncoming storm, which really lends itself to the b-horror format. You find yourself as the audience thinking "OH NO! HOW COULD YOU DO THAT!? IDIOT... YOU'RE GONNA GET IT NOW!".

And get it they do.

He takes these tried-and-true ingredients and comes up with a tighter recipe. No one can deny that Midnight's Lair isn't a lean and mean read.

But it is missing a few things that made those first few novels so great. It's missing the heart of The Cellar, and the absolute insanity of The Woods Are Dark. I cared way less about the characters here than I did in any of the afforementioned classics... I just wanted to see how they'd be dispatched. The story was a bit less captivating than those as well.

There are way worse ways you can spend 300 pages, and I can see why 15-year-old me loved this so much. If you've never read Laymon, this is a great place to start, as it's got everything he's known for tied up in a neat little package. But for the long-time fan, it's probably not going to blow your mind.

It is fun and easy horror reading that's worth a go.

PS. There are a TON of similarities between this and a book a reviewed earlier this year, The Feeding by Leigh Clark. If you enjoyed that, you'll have a good time with this, as this plays like a boiled-down version of that. They were both published around the same time...I wonder if either author had read the other before giving their cave-monster opus a go...

I give Midnight's Lair a 3.8/5. It'd be a definite 5 if I was 15 again though...