Customer Reviews

The Stake

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This was the first book of Richard Laymon's that I read, and if all his books are like this he's just earned himself another fan. The use of explicit violence and sex was so different from what most mainstream writers will allow (or be allowed, grrr, editors) in their books. The unabashed approach to horror and the use of rape (which is pretty high up there on my list of fears) is something not usually found in mainstream Horror. I can only think of one other author to pull out all the stops like this and that would have to be Bentley Little.

The way Laymon makes humans out to be more terrifying monsters than anything supernatural was great. Reading this was like watching some B-grade horror flick and I loved it. This book was near impossible to put down, I had to force myself to get some sleep. A highly original vampire tale that is not for the weak-stomached. I am definitely looking forward to reading more of Richard Laymon's work in the future, and if you take this book for a spin you will too.

I've been reading vampire novels for years, and have even written a few of my own (unpublished). Since cutting my eyeteeth on the greats like Stoker, Rice, and Lumley, to the random paperbacks by unknown authors, I thought I'd learned all their tricks. Richard Laymon proved me wrong.

This is not a vampire novel. This is a novel about being human in a dangerous, confusing, and above all unpredictable world. And that's exactly what makes it believable. The characters are real: full-fleshed and multi-faceted, with all the quirkiness of normal human beings. And whatever Laymon throws at them, they rise to the occasion admirably, with equal helpings of heroics and cowardice. The horrors they face are not just pulp-comic monsters, but far worse, because you can turn on the TV news and watch them happening every day. And yet there's still the underlying threat of the vampire...or is there?

There's so much more I'd like to write, but I wouldn't dream of spoiling the story. If you're a fan of vampire books, or the horror genre in general, this is a must-read, and you won't be disappointed. If you've never picked one up before, make this your first. You won't regret it.

As a veteran reader of Laymon I'll be the first one to tell you that the man has written just as many misses as he has hits. For every classic like "Island" or "The Cellar" there are turkeys like "Endless Night", books so trivial and banal I almost feel like I should wrap them in cardboard. But the genius of Laymon is this: even with the stinkers, he keeps us reading. I will never accuse a Laymon novel, no matter how dumb, of being a slow or boring read. "The Stake" falls somewhere in between. The quality of Laymon's writing is excellent and the setup was good however he never develops his concept to the fullest. What could have been an explosive horror novel somehow falls flat.

Larry Dunbar is a writer of gruesome horror novels. Despite the grotesqueries he writes, Larry is just about the nicest, most well-mannered person you could ever meet. He lives in a quiet suburban home with his teenaged daughter and loving wife. One day on a road trip exploring a ghost town with his wife and two of their friends, Larry stumbles upon a corpse buried under the floor of a hotel. Turns out the corpse is (apparently) a female vampire with a stake in her heart. On a return trip with his friend Pete, Larry lugs the corpse back home and sets off to write a non-fictional account of this supposed vampire. But what if the vampire is not really dormant but ready to come back to life? What happens if you pull the stake? Larry is about to find out...

The central character being a horror writer, there are definite undertones of self-referentiality to this tale. The wife and daughter, the struggles with publishers & editors, the setbacks associated with being a writer of gruesome horror, I mean really Laymon is just writing about himself here. The self-referentiality doesn't bother me that much, at least he's not using his horror writer character as a veil attempt to pepper his novel with his own opinions (a la Bentley Little) but it does become very cheesy after a while. That's too bad because his writing quality is top-notch here; he's not filling pages with dialogue, but letting setting and mood take over. He effectively juggles two separate storylines involving different characters and blends them together in the end quite nicely.

I guess my main quelm with "The Stake" is how mellow of a horror novel it ends up being. There is practically none of the violence and nudity Laymon's become so famous (or infamous) for. Even worse, there's not much action either and the marketing of this book as a vampire novel is slightly off-putting. I mean a real vampire novel would have things to scare the reader such as oh I don't know...vampires? There is only one vampire in this entire novel and she spends the whole time lying motionless in a coffin with a stake in her heart while the rest of the characters run around dealing with all sorts of unrelated things. I had high hopes for "The Stake" especially since I wanted Laymon to redeem himself after disappointing me so much with his other vampire misfire "Bite". Oh well, I guess bloodsuckers were not meant to be the man's specialty.

Richard Laymon has always been a guilty pleasure for me; and I've read and enjoyed his paperbacks for years. So, naturally, when I saw a hardcover on the New Releases shelf at the local library I did a double take at the name "Laymon". Stake has all the typical Laymon elements of horror and underlaying sexuality, but Laymon makes this story more accessible to those more refined readers that wouldn't touch a pulp horror book. The Stake is a interesting twist on the vampires that contrasts the horrors we create as humans with the mythical horrors of the supernatural. I had hoped that the Stake would gain Laymon more mainstream acceptance, but, alas, Laymon seems to have all but disappeared afterwards, (I don't think he is published in the US any longer :-().

Having read some 10 or more of Richard Laymon's novels over the past 2 or 3 years I found this, in it's own subtle way, to be close to the best. To find a "staked" corpse in a Ghost Town is one thing, but to hide it in your garage and fall in love with it - that takes the cake !! Make the hero a horror writer and it only adds to the intrigue of the story. This one gets a "9" only because I've saved the "10" for "Savage". ps - just about all of Laymon's books can be found in any popular bookstore in Australia so I'm a bit confused about the "hard to find" classification.

I am a fan of weird authors- Hunter S. Thompson, Bret Easton Ellis( Who is my fav.) etc etc. But I was told that The Stake was a good book. I hate horror novels, ever since I read Stephen King, But I got this, and what I found was that this is one of the best books about Obsession ever. We follow two stories in One.

The first is Two Couples stumble upon a Coffin with a body with a Stake through it's chest. Larry, a horror novelist, becomes obsessed and He and Pete, the other guy, plan to write a novel about it. So while Larry is finding out who the "Vampire" Is, he bcomes obsessed with who or What it is.

The Second being Larry's Daughter who has the hots for her English teacher, who turns out to be a bad person.

This book is beyond brilliant, PLEASE BUY THIS BOOK.

Richard Laymon's sudden passing on Feb. 14, 2001 was a serious blow to horror's literary validity. Anyone who has read more than one of Laymon's books will know that. The Stake is a particularly good one, alternately fall down funny and curl up into a fetal position and cry for momma scary. A horror writer (who seems to be made from a mold quite similiar to Laymon's, judging from the little writer details and scrumptious in-jokes he throws in), his wife, and their neighbors/best friends find a gruesome secret in an old, deserted ghost town. The corpse of a woman with a stake driven through her heart. This is only the first in a long line of frightening and mysterious events that befall our characters, they're far too realistically drawn to be called heroes.

As with Laymon's other stories I have read, the human monsters (which include a sadistic rapist and one loony vampire hunter) are far more disgusting and evil than the fantasical creatures that usually inhabit these sorts of tales, this makes the novel far more realistic and disturbing than its contemporaries. As with Laymon's other books I was sorry to see it end, I wanted to hang around the characters some more and see how the events colored the rest of their lives, they were THAT well drawn. Definitely a novel I will be revisiting and one I highly recommend.

Being one of the industry's most under rated writers, Richard Laymon has not lost heart and has continued to produce great books, and The Stake is a sign of the great talent that is Laymon. The Stake, has trademark Laymon - a supernatural theme, a psychotic maniac, and a perfect family caught in between all this. This however, surpasses all of Laymon's previous works, filled with scenes carefull created and character which are memorable. The plot is nicely done, and the whole novel fits in perfectly. So Laymon, well done son!!

I am as tired as anyone of average, garden-variety vampire novels. But anyone who has read Richard Laymon knows that he never writes anything average. Whether each novel is below- or above-average is certainly up for debate (and there are glimpses of both in The Stake), but run-of-the-mill fiction is simply not Richard Laymon's way.

Horror author Larry Dunbar, his next-door neighbor Pete, and their wives Jean and Barbara, are driving home from an outing when they take a detour that leads them to Sagebrush Flat and what seems to be a ghost town. While they are exploring the remains of an old hotel, Barbara nearly falls through the rotten floor and inadvertently discovers the corpse of a woman with a stake through her chest. Someone must have thought she was a vampire, killed her in the traditional way, then left her here behind a door guarded with a crucifix.

But The Stake is less about actual vampires than it is about the idea of vampires and its effect on people. Larry and Pete are fascinated by the discovery and the discuss it later on. Pete especially thinks it's a great story for Larry to use in a book -- maybe his first non-fiction work. What would make it even better, Pete thinks, would be to go back and get the corpse and bring it home with them. Larry's wife and daughter are out of town, so it would be easy to store it in his garage's attic. Then, later, they'll pull out the stake and see if she really is a vampire and comes back to life.

Here's where The Stake leaves the realm of believability and dives head-first into ridiculousness: Larry agrees with Pete, though reluctantly, and they go get the body. Critics of Richard Laymon's work have cited stupid decisions on the part of his protagonists -- made purely to serve a weak plot -- as one of his major flaws, and it certainly applies here. This novel is full of questionable choices made by otherwise intelligent individuals seemingly made only to keep the plot moving in the direction the author wishes. That good husband and father Larry decides to keep secrets from his family and that goody-two-shoes Lane decides to subtly seduce her teacher are only two of the bigger flubs.

Other Laymon choices, however, are what made it so easy to keep reading The Stake. The characters may be often stupid, but the story was compelling and I could not wait to find out what was going to happen once Larry and Pete decided to pull out the stake. Larry's research into the victim's identity and his dreams of the outcome of the stake-pulling were just as interesting as his daughter Lane's troubles at school. Laymon combines these storylines so that they come together at the end seamlessly and are not in the least predictable. I had no idea what was going to happen, and I can usually predict these things, so surprising me is a sure way to get me to recommend your book.

A few aspects of this novel add a dose of reality to an otherwise unbelievable plot. There seem to be several references to Laymon's own life and writing. Plus, the idea that the book within this book is non-fiction is an intriguing one. The dedication to "Fellow explorers & Ghost town busters" leads one to think (if only for a moment) that there might possibly be more than fiction going on in the pages of The Stake. But, no, that couldn't be, could it?

The best thing about the 3 different vampire novels of Richard Laymon's that I have read is that the books don't focus on the vampires, but rather the idea of the vampires, and the main characters' fear and desire of finding out if the creatures are truly real. Just as Bite and The Traveling Vampire Show, this vampire novel really has no classic "vampire horror" throughout the reading.

The Stake follows the adventures of Larry, a successful horror author, his wife Jean, and their married friends, Pete and Barbara. A little later in the novel, Lane, Larry's daughter, becomes a main, influential character as well. Larry and his crew find a young woman's corpse one day while exploring an old ghost town. The corpse has been impaled with a wooden stake and hidden in a compartment beneath a staircase. Larry and Pete are extremely interested in the corpse, and they end up going back out to the old town to retrieve the corpse and bring it back to their house to remove the stake and find out if she really is a vampire. This decision to involve the corpse in their lives has many consequences, and serves as the main source of intrigue within the novel.

As always, Laymon creates a large amount of great suspense. The characters in the novel were all really likable, except for Pete. The best part of the novel takes place when Larry sets out to find out the truth about this vampire that they have uncovered. The creation of the backstory by using old newspaper articles really lets the reader create an intricate, creepy image of the events that occurred which led up to the deah of the vampire. Surprisingly, this is actually one of Laymon's cleanest novels. That doesn't mean it is close to clean by normal standards, but there really aren't any graphic sex scenes like usual, and the violence, while still brutal, is nothing compared to some other of his novels that gleefully went over the top. It really feels as if Laymon just wanted to focus on the story of this novel, and didn't want it to get overshadowed by horrific violence and graphic sex.

It really is tough to find anything original about vampires these days, but if you are a fan of vampire fiction, and are looking for a different take on the genre, you definitely need to check out Richard Laymon's vampire novels. While they might be a little different from the norm, they can pay off in ways that other, average, unoriginal books cannot.