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Similar thing in The Stake…all the promised action (pulling the stake out) occurs in the last few dozen pages, but that book was fairly well written and enjoyable

My theory is that US culture tends to be pretty prudish so that the darker, edgier and seedier topics and actions don’t sit well, whereas the more ‘mature’, broad minded cultures in Uk, Aus, Europe and Canada appreciate and accept more of the material. As a Canadian I say that at the risk of sounding demeaning to US audience, but I think that a good half of their population have earned that criticism and it’s a fair critique. Same thing with Frank Zappa’s music which has always been way more popular outside of his native US (though Zappa, as distinct from Laymon, was a true genius - a 20th century Mozart)

I'm half way through it and I don't think it's that bad to be honest

I found the uncut version at a local thrift store the other day for $4.

I just read this on ur list of his best. And I totally enjoyed it. The ending works. I was wondering going through it how the daughters story was going to come into the main one. But fabulous the way he did it. You where disappointed the teacher was showing to early but I thought he did it wonderful. Especially the time the daughter was putting up boards in the classroom. You knew he was ogling her but she didn't. Brilliant read. Now I'm starting Blood Games. I'll let you know how it goes

Hope all is well and you plan on making a return. I really miss these videos.

This video has become a comfort watch/listen for me. It's wonderful to put on when I'm doing something tedious but which doesn't require my full attention (like folding a massive pile of laundry). I know I've commented before, but I really do appreciate how succinctly you break down all thirty-five of these books, your personal relationship with them over the years, and the delight that comes through once you hit "Midnight's Lair" and again with "Funland" and "Savage". I think today marked the sixth time I've gone on this journey with you from start to finish, and my only regret is that I cannot give it more than one like. Thank you so much for your hard work in putting this together. I know it's 46 minutes, but I swear it all flies by in what feels like half that time. Much like Laymon's writing itself, I suppose. :)

Finally finished this book, today, and really enjoyed it, for the most part. A little bit of a mess, but one that oddly stands out a lot from Laymon’s work. I really, really dig it. Best way to describe it was that it was special for Laymon, but not special in comparison to other writer’s incredibly special books. And that’s not even an insult hahah. God bless, man! Been a while since you uploaded, hope you folks are doing well!

This book reads like an early Eli Roth film, a la "Cabin Fever" or "Hostel". I'm enjoying it so far, 4 chapters in. Not many Laymon novels left for me to read now, actually a bit of an emotional moment! 🥲

Used to read them when I was younger. I much prefer Bentley Little, a very creative author.

Dracula, Nosferatu and.. "Elliott" the vampire 🧛‍♂️ 😅

This book was frigging WILD 🤯

Yeah this was the first Laymon book I ever read, and I thought it was so poor I nearly didn't go on to read the Beast House trilogy and all the rest of his output. It really is absolute dogsh1t 🐕💩

I quite liked this one, but to be fair, the last time I read it was when I was 17, single and devouring the most extreme horror books I could find 🤷‍♂️

If Laymon had survived a few years longer, we would have had more books like this from him and it would have been a quantum leap of improvement. He would have won the BSA plenty more times 🥺

On the subject of the dubbed lines, I've watched enough badly dubbed Shaw Brothers Kung Fu films and enough Fulci and Argento Giallo films in my time to say that an engaged audience will happily take no notice of bad dubbing if the action makes up for it 😅

Laymon's estate are missing a trick. They could do a "V.C Andrews" and have a designated ghost writer churn out a book a year in Laymon's style.

I’ll have to try it again. I DNF it after the first 50 pages because Sherry makes the stupidest decisions and for me there’s nothing worse than a stupid protagonist. Even worse, Sherry is a teacher and yet she believes his story about the van and her boyfriend walking away with a gay guy in a fishnet shirt (seeing his pierced nipples in the dark!!) and the naked girl sexually accosting Toby in the bathroom of Taco Bell (told to her by a student who any teacher who got their degree would not believe). All this was bad enough (as I kept saying out loud “you’ve got to be kidding”) but when she escapes him and makes it back to the Taco Bell, instead of getting one of the employees to call the police or ask the students to help or call police, she instead goes to the washroom and clean her wounds. Aaaaarrrrggghhh. I had to stop. I love a lot of Laymon books but this was too hard to stomach. Reading The Lake right now and loving it

Have you reviewed The Resort yet?

I’ve got 50 pages left and I agree 110% about much of the middle and until where I am now, and that is the repetitive dialogue. The girls go over the same dialogue again and again when they are looking for Helen. The flashbacks are a nice respite. The choice not to go to the police was frustrating. The book could have been 280 pages instead of the 480 that is my copy. Body shaming is bad. He does squeeze in some body descriptions of the girls by the girls themselves or the narrator, instead of the traditional horny male protagonist, but much less than usual to be sure

In his latter day interview, Laymon looks like a short haired, glasses wearing nerd, so maybe in high school and his 20s he had no amorous contact with girls and is haunted and obsessed with their bodies, which is what a frustrated teen would do

The reviews of even the terrible books are really valuable for many reasons….to avoid them, is the biggest reason, but also for entertainment value. It’s why I always enjoyed Siskel and Eberts reviews of bad movies. Often very funny

On the topic of Laymon going on about fat women bein unloved etc….Laymon himself, in the one filmed interview that I’ve seen, is a kind of tubby, modestly overweight, nerdy looking, short hair, glasses, dweeby guy. Looks like the uncool guy in high school who might have been teased himself. So it’s odd about some of his characterization sin his books. Looking forward to reading this one

Great review, pal! Can’t believe I missed this one, back when it was uploaded! Lol. I read this book many years ago, right after high school, and really enjoyed it. I recently got a new copy of it, for my collection, so I’m excited to re-read it sometime. I remember the ending being a bit odd, though lol. Thanks for another awesome review. Love your channel, as always, my dude. God bless you.

Ah yes, the one that started it all 🖤 the best vignette of the book, in my opinion, is where the tramps all get massacred in the abandoned churchyard

I managed to get my hands on the trilogy of these Richards books in my local library. It's a massive book with 3 in it but I'm looking forward to getting stuck into it. Thanks again for the very professional review 👍 Just finished the 3 in 1 books from the Beast House 🏠a few weeks back and every book Just got better and better. The cellar was hard to read but I'm a Laymon fan so I got through it. The second book the Beast House was a better read and way more professional. And the last one The Midnight Tour was outstanding. Love all the characters except for Sam's girlfriend A good twist which I never seen coming was what happened to Sandy after 5 years. Sam was a legend especially when he went thinking about things. God that made me laugh. Bit disappointed to what happened to John. He was a very strong character and we should have been let knowing to what happened to him. It's such a pity Richard passed before. But a excellent ride 👌

This is one of only two of his books that I didn't get to the end of, because attempting to reading it was an absolute slog >.<

Finally got to read this one. Of course the first thing after finishing, is come to see your thoughts of it. Great review as always. All your points make sense to me and I (as always) appreciate your thoughts. Sadly, for me this was also too long and I had a few struggles to finish it. It didnt work for me. At least not as much as I thought it would. Especially the ending (with Jims scheme) made no sense to me and Left me very disappointed. Despite the well written characters (for a Laymon Novel) I would rate this only 3 out of 10.

This is next on the list for me, and I can't wait 😁

It was like reading a Goosebumps book that was written for adults 😊

Always looks forward to these videos. Keep them coming!

Thanks for sharing. Keep up the good reviews

Your criticisms of Little Logic are what's keeping me from picking up another book by him. There are better horror authors and more fun too. Good review as usual.

Was the first Bentley book i read, i liked it to be honest. Good review.

thankyou for this, i really hope you can read and review evil deeds/death instinct by bentley little (1992) at some stage, i think you will like it, take care.

Reading Laymon's novels chronologically, this coming right after "The Stake" is about the most jarring literary whiplash one can get. Almost like Laymon was saying, "Well, I got that out of my system. Back to the ultraviolence and titties!" And in a way, that's exactly what happened. He finished "The Stake" and started writing "One Rainy Night" without knowing how the change in his writing with "The Stake" would be received, both by his publishers and his audience. Thus, "One Rainy Night" was Laymon hedging his bets: if people somehow didn't like the style of "The Stake", then the next book out of the gate would be a return to basic form. If they did like "The Stake", he'd know by the time "One Rainy Night" came out and could write subsequent works accordingly. Audiences responded favorably to the pacing of "The Stake", so Laymon went more in that direction for "Darkness, Tell Us". British audiences absolutely ate "One Rainy Night" up: it was printed multiple times in hardcover, in paperback, and via book club (which, I'm guessing, was the version advertised on the back of your mother's magazine). In the US, paperback horror publisher Onyx had published "Funland" and "Resurrection Dreams". They rejected "One Rainy Night" on the basis of perceived cultural insensitivity (a Black man performing a black magic ritual to get revenge on an entire town for the murder of his grandson apparently did not play well to the 'politically correct' crowd), and that ended Laymon's association with them. St. Martin's Press did a hardcover printing of "The Stake", but they passed on "One Rainy Night", so I didn't get to read this one until Leisure put out the mass-market paperback in 2000. Great review again. I love Laymon, but man do I agree with you when you say it isn't wise to subject yourself to nothing but him for months on end!

The rumor you heard about the book being an early manuscript of his is true. Laymon, in "A Writer's Tale", references a novel he wrote after "The Cellar" but before "The Woods Are Dark" which he had then titled "Dead Corse". The novel is about a female mummy named Amara who returns from the dead and goes on a rampage. The editor at Warner rejected the manuscript with the comment that it wasn't the right book to follow "The Cellar". What's great, though, is that Laymon doesn't seem at all upset that "Dead Corse" never saw print, since he was able to use the remains of a beautiful dead woman in a later book, only this time with a stake in her chest. He writes: "Odd how things work out. If Warner Books had accepted and published 'Dead Corse', I would have 'used up' the alluring female mummy idea. 'The Stake', if written at all, would have been a very different book. I'd rather have 'The Stake' than 'Dead Corse', so thank God for rejections!" Amen to that, I say! The matter of "Into the Pit" being included in "Amara" (or "To Wake the Dead" as it was called here in the US) also got me curious, but I think I've worked out the timeline on this as well. My assumption is that Laymon wrote the segment as it stands in "Amara" as part of a draft for "Dead Corse" back in the late 70s or early 80s. "Dead Corse" failed to land, and Laymon assumed it would never see the light of day, but I imagine he was quite fond of the story-within-the-story he'd come up with for the diary. "Dreadful Tales" says that "Into the Pit" is original to that publication, so my guess is Laymon re-wrote that segment from "Dead Corse" and had it published in "Dreadful Tales", since it works as a stand-alone story, is entertaining in its own right, and doesn't seem out of place in a short story collection. After his death, I imagine "Dead Corse" was located as a complete but unpublished manuscript, like "The Glory Bus", "No Sanctuary", and "The Lake", which his family offered to Leisure in the US, and Headline in the UK. The title was changed, but the contents, including the bit he had repurposed as "Into the Pit" for "Dreadful Tales" remained as he had written them twenty-ish years earlier, for better or for worse.

There's a neat little piece of crossover between this one and "Night Show" which I caught on a recent re-read. At one point in "Night Show", we see one of the characters watching an evening news break hosted by a presenter named Sandy Chung. In "Beware!", one of the crimes the invisible villain brags about having committed is the unsolved murder of news anchor Sandy Chung. Laymon doesn't go out of his way to point out the connection, and it's possible our invisible sociopath is just making stuff up, but as far as I'm aware, we never see Sandy Chung's name mentioned in any other books, meaning some time between "Night Show" and "Beware!", in the Laymon-verse, Sandy hosted her last newscast.

in Italian, "giallo" films are basically crime movies with lots of murders. Anything else, witches, monsters, etc should not be called "giallo"

How did I miss this one going up until now? We're definitely on the same page with Laymon's short stories. Most of them don't do much for me, but "Madman Stan" is such a wonderful little "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" style urban legend that even people who don't care for horror can enjoy it. It's absolutely my favorite of his short pieces, and any time anyone asks me for a short story recommendation for something that is "horror" but not "scary", it's my go-to selection. "Eats" is another of my favorites: a perfect showcase for Laymon's comedic talent which does exactly what it sets out to do, takes a bow, and leaves us to chuckle at the carnage. "Fiends" is...yeah, um, the less said about it, the better in my opinion. Completely agree that the only reason this saw print is because it's something Laymon wrote, and here was an opportunity to press it into service as a lead-off novella. If you start reading him with this story, you'll stop reading him with this story, it really is that bad. "A Good, Secret Place" is another one of those stories you read and think, "Really...?" I know it was the title piece for a collection which was nominated for a Stoker, but like you, I honestly struggle to see what people liked about this one. It's not a bad story per se, it's just not all that particularly memorable even with the gender-reveal "twist", which even Laymon has done better in some of his other stories. If you're interested in another good Laymon short story, I highly recommend "Keepers". It was published as an 8-page chapbook by Gauntlet Press back in 2001, and they've kept it in print ever since. I bought it a few months back, and it's stayed with me for a LONG time. One of the darkest things I think Laymon ever wrote, but also one of his best. Much like "Dinker's Pond", this could have been slotted into "Savage" and fit just fine. Excellent work distilling these stories down and reviewing them, and I'm sorry I missed this one when it originally came out. Thanks for all your work, and I hope to see you with 500 subscribers sooner rather than later. You definitely deserve a wider audience!

I've read Funland three times now, and each time I read it, it moves a notch or two further up my list of favorite Laymon books. My first time through, I wasn't all that enamored with it. I picked it up again around a decade later to do my own chronological re-read of his novels, and found myself enjoying it quite a bit more. My most recent re-read happened in 2020 while on furlough from my job, and again, enjoyed it. "Cockless Robin" still gets a laugh out of me. According to his autobiography, Laymon was inspired to write the story after a real-life visit to an amusement park in Santa Cruz with his family, where they were repeatedly approached by homeless people begging for change, dubbed 'Trolls' by the locals. There was also apparently a real-life serial killer believed to be operating in the area, accounting for numerous disappearances and deaths over the years (Laymon's visit was around 1984). And the Trollers? They too were a thing: real roving gangs of locals, mostly teenagers, who would stalk the streets at night, rough up the occasional derelict, and run them out of town with a warning not to come back, or else. He saw signs on shop windows and cars with bumper stickers proclaiming support for the Trollers. The Trollers' tactics were quite effective--when Laymon visited the Santa Cruz boardwalk four years later in 1988, there were no drifters or homeless people to be seen. The local brand of vigilante justice had seemingly prevailed. Obviously Laymon fictionalized a great deal for his novel, but the fact real life helped him by inventing not just the Trolls but the Trollers as well is equal parts humorous and awful to me. It really is wild just how many actual incidents in his life turned into fodder for his stories. Truth once again reveals itself stranger than fiction. :)

This is my third time through your ranking video, and I'm sure it won't be my last. I would have a difficult time ranking all of the Laymon books/stories I've read in this way, although the way you put it is quite true: aside from the very bottom and the very top, where stuff falls in the middle is quite interchangeable. Maybe I'll try it some day. Like you, I love that some of my favorites are ones you didn't care for very much, and vice versa. What I love most about Laymon, I think, and why I've been obsessed with not just reading but collecting his works over the last twenty five years or so, is that when he's good, he's SO good, but even when he doesn't quite stick the landing you're (almost) always left with a hell of a ride, or the exploration of a neat idea, or both. :)

This book was an absolute cascade of events keeping up was at times difficult it was like one murder after another 🤣 the ending for me was just very odd it's like a guide to corpse disposal 🤣

Just read this for the 1st time very strange as I read almost all laymons books. Thanks for introducing me to this very good book only criticism I had was mels jealousy of Penn other than her looks didn't give enough back story on that. But I really enjoyed it thanks for the review I hadn't even heard of this one until I watched it good stuff loved the ending.

This one was a wild ride! 🔪

What an excellent video! Laymon was always my go-to author during my teenage years. I remember my parents were out at the cinema one night when I was reading "Flesh" and I ended up barricading myself in the living room, I was so spooked! Of course, I now have to re-read all of his books due to the memories this has stirred up.

Have you read John Saul ? He's one of my favourites, good author. Also check out Stephen Laws.

A rare occurence in horror where the sequel is better than the original! 😎👌🏽 also this one was following sequel formula to an art form: bigger budget, more elaborate death scenes and more entertaining sub plots

Well, where to begin with this one? 🤣 So this one, along with Beast House and The Midnight Tour in a 3 book anthology, was the second book of his that I read. The first one was Allhallows Eve and even at 13 years old I thought that one was shite 💩 so my expectations for The Cellar were low. But boy oh boy, did it serve to redeem Laymon! 😎👌🏽I was a committed convert from that point onwards. Problematic issues aside, it was a truly unforgettable reading experience and a sick, filthy, mean-spirited standard-bearer for all that followed.. 👹💀👻

I have a personal connection to Richard Laymon in much the same way as you've described throughout these reviews. My brother and I scoured the North of England in our teens, picking up 2nd hand copies of his works at car boot sales! 🤠 I had high hopes when I started this one, having read all the reviews saying it was his best one. In many ways it was ONE of his best ones, but for me, the dialogue was irritating as it swapped from cockney to west country to Northern and back again with Americanisms thrown about. Also I found the pacing to be problematic as it peaked and troughed a lot, especially in part two and in moments of part 3. Great review series you've got here, I'll be commenting as I go along 😊👻💀