As is always the case with our Mr Laymon you're guaranteed certain things from him no matter what, including, but not limited to, a pretty young woman in red gym shorts(although other colours are of course available), at least one sex-in-the-shower scene(or so I'm told
), large quantities of descriptive text involving the aforementioned red gym shorts girl, usually involving the perkiness of her breasts, or more than likely, the wonderfully clinging quality of her red gym shorts in relation to her pert buttocks!
All this is well and good of course but what about the story? Well, this one's a doozy. It involves a librarian called Jane who finds a strategically placed envelope on her chair in the library where she works which contains money and a little riddle leading her to the next envelope containing more money and another riddle. In fact the money keeps doubling each time as the riddles lead her into more and more dangerous situations.
If I were a less experienced Laymon fan, I'd probably have wondered at Jane's enthusiasm for putting herself in potentially extreme situations for little more than great fat wads of cold, hard cash(whut??). It's all fun and games at first being sent to locate a book and clambering up statues, but when the dogs are unleashed... well anyway, suffice to say things get even more worrisome as the wads get bigger. Although having said that, the money does build very quickly, and all thoughts of danger probably seem worth the risk when 10s of $1000s are at stake. There is of course her new friend who goes by the unlikely name of
'Brace' and within the blink of an eye our two heroes are getting down and dirty with the best of them.
I had read in various reviews around cyberspace that there's a great twist ending. This confused me since I either missed it, or was too stupid to see it, or was just plain wrongly informed in the first place. MOG(master of games) who's the one leaving all the envelopes and riddles reminds me of another of Richard Laymon's characters from one of his other books. I think it was
Blood Games but I can't for the life of me remember his name now. Anyway, I'm pretty sure it can't be linked to that character since there doesn't seem any reason for it to be so. I don't know. What was that about? Was I misinformed? or is there a twist ending?
So leaving aside the slight disappointment with the whole who is MOG? mystery which didn't seem to live up to it's hype at all, it was a great ride and featured lots of mentions of breasts, pert buttocks and gym shorts(which were blue and shiny in this instance) rather than the traditional red. I bookmarked some points of note as I was reading which I thought might be fun to list. So here we go then,
- There are a couple of instances of Jane mentioning
Big Bad Billy Goat Gruff which you may remember from
Funland.
-
Brace shows his worth by dozing off while Jane is in the shower. Bear in mind that she has just narrowly escaped being raped by a couple of homeless men under a bridge and is calling out to him and getting no reply. Turns out he's dozed off on the living room floor with a pillow over his head... as you do!?!
- Jane is wearing
White shorts at the 25% mark. Gasp!!
- There may well be a mention of
The Beast House at the 39% mark.
- And another mention here at 41%.
- MOG refers to Jane as a
hot wet wench at the 63% mark.
There's no real reason for me to mention this, other than the fact that I'm a bit of a perv myself and it brought a dodgy smile to my lips. Sorry.
-
Brace is seen wearing blue gym shorts at the 83% mark.
I see no good reason for that to upset me really, but it does.
So that's my little list of goodies for your pleasure. I really enjoyed this but I wish the whole MOG thing had been dealt with a little more definitively. I'm still a little confused as to who MOG is exactly. Did I miss something there? He seems to have just appeared without any reason as such. And how was he able to keep moving in and out of places like some sort of wraith or ghost, and more importantly, writing on Jane while she slept and carving messages on her with a knife(again, without waking her) and other remarkable things such as these.
Really good read, as usual with Mr Laymon's books. I've just noticed I've still got
Midnight's Lair on my kindle too. Hooray!