Richard Laymon - The Woods Are Dark

[vaughan]

You can find some other comments about Laymon in my thread regarding "Allhallow's Eve".

The Woods are Dark was my introduction to Laymon, the first book of his writing I actually sat to read.

There is no need to repeat everything I noted in the first thread, what I wrote about Laymon there is true here, also. I'll just write a couple things about "The Woods are Dark" in this thread......

Once again this novel is a quick read, you'd certainly get through it over a weekend with a page count of 247 pages. Laymon's breezy, almost casual style, means you can get right into the book and enjoy the story without getting derailed by over-characterization (which is as bad as no characterization) and descriptions of events or sights that have no relevance to the story the author is trying to tell. In other words, Laymon concentrates on telling his story, and anything superfluous gets left out.

The premise, as sold to us by the back cover blurb, is the existence of The Killing Tree's. These are six dead tree's, tree's that the locals take kidnapped tourists too, tying them up until they're taken by......

As such there is a lot of mystery in this one - what are the tree's there for? Who takes the tourists and why? What are the locals afraid of?

Laymon creates some nice set piece in a local motel, and there is a young character in this that is well done as there is role reversal with her mother (the young girl fights for both of them, with guns, knives and fists).

When all is revealed it's quite satisfying. There is a standoff toward the end of the book which has a great location, and the evil presence in the Woods is actually quite interesting. You can hardly see how things are going to be resolved.

So....... Laymon does it again...... toward the very end (the last 40 pages or so) we are presented with a climax that seems tacked on. Sadly, it's also very very interesting, but given the page count it's obvious that it won't develop into anything (within this book anyway). Id' even go as far as to say - Laymon doesn't really end this one. Something is introduced right at the end, something exciting and monstrous, but there is simply no room to go into background, or to involve it in the real to the story other than to introduce it..... This reads like part 1 of a series (and maybe it is, sorry for my ignorance about Laymon).

As such, once again, I'd say this is a good read - but it might disappoint some who have an expectation that the story they're reading much actually wrap things up. This story is akin to having King Kong walk on the final 5 minutes of the film, and for the climax to end when he's up way up the Empire State Building.

[dem bones]

This one was only Laymon's second published novel. His debut, The Cellar (a big fans favorite and still regarded by many critics as his best), had sold incredibly well, but The Woods Are Dark flopped and effectively killed his career stone dead for years as far as America concerned. Over here and in Europe it was a completely different story and he's one of few horror authors - King, Herbert, Koontz, maybe Masterton, Hutson and the latest Mammoth Best New Horror if you're lucky - whose work you'll still find in libraries, which, of course, leads to him being dismissed as too populist by elitist horror lit. snobs. It's been a l-o-n-g time since i read The Woods Are Dark but i don't remember being as anything like as disappointed with it as i was All Hallowes Eve which after a promising build up, completely loses it's way. I think you're in for some far better times with RL though, vaughan, as the general consensus is that neither of the above catch him on top form, and for once, the general consensus is probably right. For what it's worth, I really like The Cellar, Funland and Midnight's Lair meself.

Enjoyed your review!

[vaughan]

Funnily enough, The Cellar is one of the other books I bought - so I'll get to that soon. I have a couple more lined up prior though. I want to spread out my experiences rather than go headlong into one author.

Thanks for the extra information too, much appreciated!

[dem bones]

Richard Laymon - The Woods Are Dark (Headline, 1991)

Steve Crisp

Blurb:
`A ROLLER-COASTER RIDE THROUGH HELL' - Gary Brandner, author of The Howling

In the woods are six dead trees. The Killing Trees. That's where they take them. People like Neala and her friend Sherri and the Dills family. Innocent travellers on vacation on the back roads of California. Seized and bound, stripped of their valuables and shackled to the Trees. To wait. In the woods. In the dark ...

Forty pages of Eric Mackenzie-Lamb's morbidly entertaining Labyrinth to go then this is next up from the 'to reread' pile: only the vaguest memories of The Woods Are Dark from the first time around - some nasty business about hapless backpackers tied to trees as a sacrifice to a bunch of Californian cannibals with more than a touch of The Hills Have Eyes about them - didn't rate it that highly but was probably Laymon-ed out by then. There are at least three different versions of The Woods Are Dark. The original, reputedly butchered and rewritten by a squeamish Warners, was Laymon's next published novel after celebrated (and big selling) début, The Cellar. It bombed, and Laymon bitterly blamed Warners for murdering his career in the US before it had got off the ground. Next up, the UK edition we have before us, and the word on the block has it that it runs fifty pages or so longer than the Warner; and then there's the posthumous 'uncut' edition, published by Cemetery Dance in 2008 which is slightly shorter than the Headline (?).

[dem bones]

There is hitting the ground running and then there is The Woods Are Dark. Neala O'Hare and pal Sherri are driving along a peaceful road toward Yosemite. Eight paragraphs in and "in front of them, the legless thing dragged itself over the road with powerful, hairy hands." The severed female hand It lobs through the passenger window lands in Neala's hair. The legless thing scuttles off into the trees and, after a quick vomit, the girls drive on until they reach creepy, remote Barlow and its diner (how can they even think of eating? A 'Terkburger Special' with extra onions at that). As the would-be backpackers get stuck in, the cadaverous waitress locks the door. You ain't going no place girls.

High school teacher Lander Dillis is driving the same stretch of road, his passengers wife Ruth, daughter Cordelia (name like that, she has to be the heroine) and her new boyfriend Ben who Lander approves of as he's very polite. He's not so keen on the thought of them having sex, and it makes him sick to think they most certainly have. It's been a long drive and his passengers vote unanimously to stay at a motel overnight. The Sunshine Motor Inn, Barlow, has a vacancy ...

very early days yet but already i'm getting the impression that Woods ... is the template for just about every post-The Cellar Laymon novel.

[dem bones]

Pursuit, capture, escape. Pursuit, capture, escape, MURDERS. Pursuit, capture, escape. RAPE. Pursuit, capture, escape. THE THING IN THE PIT! Escape, Pursuit ...

Laymon's novels are usually pacey affairs but this one is mad-ass breakneck, possibly even more-so than his manic celebration of snuff movies, Out Are The Lights. If this version of the novel is similar to the one he presented to Warners, i think we can guess certain scenes they took exception to, many of them involving twelve year old Jenny Stover. By the time we reach page 100, Jenny has slit a policeman's throat, fired five bullets into her odious step-dad Hank's face at point blank range, and taken out grim-faced Krull collaborator Jack Shaw - and Timmy, his fledgling rapist of an idiot son - in a frenzied stabbing session. And that's just her warming up. Throw in voyeurism, multiple rapes, child-molestation and cannibalism - hadn't anyone at Warners bothered to read The Cellar?

The plot is dead simple. The people of Barlow have a deal going with the Krulls whereby, if they deliver them all strangers who pass through town, the hugely deformed inbred cannibals leave them be. But they must NEVER try and leave Barlow. If they do, the Krulls will dispense grisly death to their relatives. Johnny Robbins has been a 'Delivery Man' since the age of eighteen but recently he's been suffering pangs of conscience. Robbins has the hots for Neala and can't bear the thought of the Krulls tearing her to pieces and feeding on her flesh. He resolves to uncuff her from the Killing Tree before the ghouls get to her, then make a break for it with his sister Peg and niece Jenny (see above).

All the main characters take turns at being lashed to the Killing Trees and, this being Laymon, you're never sure who, if any will survive. He'll get you rooting for one likable soul only to rub your face in their spilled entrails when you think they're finally in the clear. Several nice touches including a field of severed heads rammed onto poles, and a pregnant inbred moron, the cups of whose home-made bikini-top are the skinned faces of children. And then there's the delightful Rose Petal, a drooling, sex-crazed toothless hag dressed in just a Dodgers baseball cap, a t-shirt with 'Baby' emblazoned across the chest and an arrow pointing at her groin, and a pair of pink bikini pants. Rose's weapon of choice is a claw hammer and Laymon evidently so enjoyed her destruction of treacherous coward Art Phillips with same, he recycled the scene in a later novel (pretty sure it was All Hallows Eve).

The final revelation, in which the Krull chieftain Grar (!) is revealed to be a respectable member of the community, is straight from Frederick C. Davis - The Molemen Want Your Eyes territory (via Scooby Doo) and that just about sums up The Woods Are Dark for me, an 'eighties equivalent of the weird menace pulps.

[franklinmarsh]

The Woods Are Dark - Richard Laymon
NEL September 1983 - First published by Warner Books Inc 1981.

Neala looked at the woman's hand.

Slim, elegant, an even Californian tan contrasted with the pale band above the knuckle that marked a missing wedding ring.She had painted her nails a pretty opalescent coral. This was a woman who cared for her appearance, had an eye for colour.

Briefly their fingers touched.

Then, convulsively, she flung the hand from her. The vomit rose, hot and bitter in her throat, as she saw the white flash of bone though the black, clotted blood that masked the stump.

Scuttering, crablike, the legless man-creature that had thrown the severed object into the car, disappeared into the roadside bushes...

Just when I was beginning to despair that I'd ever read another delirious pulp novel, a trip to a local hospital with the Mrs revealed a second hand bookstall, with a collection of tatty paperbacks, all one pound each. I thought this pricing a little extortionate, but first I spotted a NEL edition of Michael Slade's Cutthroat, and then this early Laymon.
The Mrs went off for her x-ray, and I idly scanned the first few pages. Next thing I knew I was deep into a depraved, bloodthirsty, disgusting tale of an off the beaten track little town in the US that kidnapped unwary travellers, and chained them to trees as a sacrifice to a hideous race of pseudo stone age creatures.

Of course, it's not that simple.

I haven't enjoyed a book so much in ages. It's early Laymon so there's not a great deal of characterisation, no red shorts and the ending is very rushed, but the whole thing moves at a crazy lick, and is full of brutal murder, insanity, twists, sex and maniacal drooling over nakedness.

On to Cutthroat!