Richard Laymon - Amara

[dem bones]

Richard Laymon - Amara (Headline, 2003)

Steve Crisp

Blurb
AMARA, Princess of Egypt, the once-beautiful wife of Mentuhotep the First, lies in her coffin in the Charles Ward museum. She has been dead for 4000 years. Or has she?

Barney the nightwatchman is the first to discover that the mummy's coffin has been broken open. It seems grave-robbers are at work but it's a pity Barney can't tell the authorities how the mummy came to be missing. The dead can't testify to anything.
Now Amara is free again and nothing can kill her - for she is dead already.

Laymon and mummy lore. Not an obvious fit perhaps, but fear not. The reanimated redhead is malevolence incarnate, the horror content is proper ghoulish, and, as the author never ceases to remind us, fit young women still have big, bouncy BREASTS.

Robert Callahan shoots dead two house-breakers hired to steal a 4,000 year-old mummy from his private collection. Their corpses are soon disposed of but, far more troublesome, the sacred seal imprisoning Amara in her coffin is broken. Imad, Callahan's faithful manservant, mindful of what's to come, gallantly scarpers. Callahan retires to bed. The shrunken, eyeless travesty of what once was a beautiful Egyptian Queen joins him between the sheets ...

On Callahan's appalling death, Imad inherits his entire worldly goods. The Egyptian is thoroughly ashamed of his cowardice on the night it all happened and desperate to make amends. Having first nailed Amira back in the coffin, he donates Robert's collection to the Charles Ward museum. His precautions are to no avail. Amira is soon up and destroying Barney Quinn, nightwatchman.

Love and, for want of a better word, romance. Susan Connors, assistant curator at the museum, and Taggart 'Tag' Parker, cop, plan to marry just as soon as her divorce comes through. In the meantime, Tag has a jealous stalker to contend with. Mabel Rudge, an obese, crazy-drunk beggar, has the hots for him in a murderous way.

Turns out Imad is blessed with a humongous chopper and a sex-drive to match. He's none too particular where he sticks that thing, hence this afternoon's ill-fated encounter with Hydra, a conniving skank with a racist thug sometime-boyfriend. Imad humiliated the latter in a bar fight, and Blaze, as he calls himself, is not one to let bygones be bygones.

Not content with beating her up and gobbing in her face, Mabel just nailed a dead cat to Susan's door, left a very nasty accompanying message, too.

Ninety-pages in, and seems we're only warming up.

[helrunar]

That all sounds... really quite special, dear.

They'll lap it up in the burbs! (so to speak)

I'm not familiar with this author but the book does sound like classic Vault fare.

cheers, H.

[dem bones]

He's a very Vault author, Steve. I'm wary of the posthumously published Laymon's , but this one sure hits the spot. The Mummy is magnificent. She's since done a job on the two replacement watchmen and currently resides under a little kid's bed. Byron, a budding entrepreneur, charges his schoolchums 50 cents a peek ... or did, until Amara revived in the moonlight.

Other plots on the go. Young Ed Lake has been abducted by cowled, tit-torturing, digit mangling sex maniacs of killer stripe. He and fellow prisoners Marco and Virginia are confined in linked cages. These chapters read like a kinky as Hell contemporary take on the shudder pulps at their most mindlessly sadistic.

Meanwhile Cody has stolen a car and ran off with girlfriend Grace and her obnoxious little sis, Pix, to escape the girls' rapist stepfather.

Karen, Byron's babysitter, is getting it on with boyfriend Eric when they hear a disturbance from upstairs in the kid's room. Eric just has to investigate ...

Halfway there.


* This section hasn't seen much business recently, so have moved in all the Laymon threads to liven it up *