Customer Reviews

Woods are Dark

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I've been all about trying out new (or new to me, at least) horror authors recently. 3 or 4 names really stood out in my search, Ketchum, Lee, Little, and Laymon. People either seem to love them or hate them. I decided to give Laymon a try, so I hunted down the UK editions of Funland, The Cellar, and The Woods are dark. So far, I'm very impressed.

I won't write a synopsis of the story, you can read the dust jacket for that. I will say that The Woods are dark, has the feel of a cross between Off Season and Deep In the Darkness. There's nothing creepier than deformed cannabalistic Inbreeders! It's well written and contains twists and turns that are unexpected. I would like to have had a little more back story revealed but it doesn't diminish the story at all.

I don't know how I missed these guys as a teen-ager. I guess the American world of horror literature was too jammed up with King and Barker. No room was left for Laymon, his style must have been just a little to edgy for mass-marketability. It's true what they say about getting your hands on the UK prints of his books. It's worth it. The US editions are hacked to pieces, no pun intended.

A legless thing with powerful hairy arms dragged itself across the road. It paused for a moment in the car's headlights, in front of Neala and Sherri. It tossed a severed human hand which landed between the girls, and then scurried away into the dark forest . . .

This is the best Richard Laymon I have read. So compelling that I literally could not stop reading. It's an erotic thriller that will have your heart racing from the first page to the last.

I am convinced that Laymon cannot write a bad book. This story is about travelers that seem to "disappear" as they are traveling through a small town. Maybe its the Krull's that live in the forest - which are deformed human being like creatures that make the forests their home?

If this is your first Laymon book - I guarantee it won't be your last! Fun and easy reading, and written in Laymon's classic innocent style.

The British edition published in 1991 by Headline is the good version. (see amazon.co.uk)

The 1981 edition from Warner Books was wrecked by the editor.

Richard Laymon ignored all of the changes from the US edition when his British publisher offered to publish the book.

This book is excellent it was the first book of Laymons I read and after reading another 5 they still havent been up to the standards as this one. it keeps you on the edge of your seat all the way through the book right from page one, its the best horror/suspense story i have ever read whith a great plot. i would definatly recommend it to everyone who likes horror.

In typical Laymon fashion, this book starts out with a bang. One minute the characters are in a comfortable, familiar setting and before the first chapter is over they have dropped into a ghastly world populated by monsters and seemingly normal folks (who's in charge of whom?). As the story unwinds the motivations and origins of these ghoulish beings becomes clear and makes sense. The pace of the story is unrelenting. the horror never stops. There are no slow passages to tempt you to set this book down and catch your breath. The twists and turns pull you along to the last page. This is as good as the best of Laymon's writing.

I had to purchase the original edition and read it again since it had been a long time and I didn't remember much of it. True, the Warner edition was poorly proofread, but it was pretty much the same as the Headline Feature version available in Great Britain. The Great Britain version just brushed up the typos. The restored version is very much different.

The beginning: Both are almost the same for the first eight chapters. Some of the dialogue is different, but the setup is the same.

The middle: All of the Lander Dills material was cut from the original. After reading it, and considering what the market was like back then, I can understand why. It is pretty perverse and the more he descends into madness, the more crazy the story gets. The problem is that, in the Warner version, there is an entire subplot that deals with Johnny Robbins' sister and niece as they try to escape town. There is also a good bit of material with the people in town looking for Peg and Jenny that was in the original. Why was all of this cut? I wish they had left it in, and included the Lander material. The book would have been a bit longer, but more well rounded. There was a lot more about the cannibals in the new version, and it talked about the offshoot tribes in the woods. The new version is also a lot edgier and much more sexual. Most of the Sherri, Neala, Robbins chapters and the Cordie chapters are pretty much the same.

The end: POTENTIAL SPOILER ALERT! I don't want to ruin it for curious people. The Manfred Krull/Weiss thing threw me. The original end had more to do with the townspeople and a crazy "hole" that was thankfully edited out of the recut in favor of a more realistic and less supernatural end. I don't, however, know how much more or less believable the "helicopter" scene was. I liked the new Lander ending as well. It made more sense.

Either way, I think the new version is stronger and much better. I just wish it has left in the Peg and Jenny scenes. I would recommend both books. The Warner version isn't as bad as most people say.

If you have a baseball or football team, you may have a number of good players, but there is often one star player that shines far above the rest. Such is also the case with the author lineup for the horror novels of Leisure Books: while they have a number of decent writers, they also have their star, namely Richard Laymon. The Woods are Dark, one of his earliest works, shows again why he stands out from the crowd.

If movies can have director's cuts, so can a book have a writer's cut. The original version of The Woods are Dark was substantially different from Laymon's manuscript and it had been left to his child to put it together the way Laymon intended. I've never read the other version, but given how good this version is, it's hard to believe the other one is better.

This short novel follows Neala and Sherri who, while on vacation, stop for a bite to eat in the small town of Barlow. Big mistake. The residents of this out-of-the-way town have a tendency to take unwary outsiders prisoner and put them out in the woods, where a savage bunch of inbred cannibals (called the Krulls) do what savage cannibals would be expected to do. Sherri and Neala are not alone in impending victimhood; the Barlowites have also kidnapped the Dills family - Lander and Ruth, their teenage daughter Cordelia and Cordelia's boyfriend Ben.

Although freed from their bondage by a sympathetic townsperson, they are far from out of the woods, either figuratively or literally. Most of the novel has the six of them - plus their rescuer - avoiding the Krulls with sporadic success. For some, death will occur, while others there is degradation and/or insanity.

As is typical for Laymon, this is a book filled with both sex and violence, often combined, so it is not for the squeamish (and as usual, women get the worst of it). But as is also typical for Laymon, this is a fast paced novel that is a well written thriller. For those who enjoy a nicely grim horror story, The Woods are Dark delivers.

I should qualify my review by saying that I'm always looking for horror books with some literary merit as opposed to the usual mass-market trash. Unfortunately for me, this book is not literature by any step of the imagination. What frustrates me is that in Laymon I see little glimmers of brilliance that he promptly buries under crap. But anyway, here's a brief synopsis:

There's this weird small town that's been capturing strangers that pass through and feeding them to cannibalistic savages that live in the woods. Two college girls that stop in the diner find themselves chained to a tree along with a couple that stopped at a local motel, their teenage daughter, and her boyfriend. They escape with the help of one of the townspeople and the rest of the book involves them running around the woods trying to stay alive. The father really goes off the deep end, and his story ends up being kind of clever.

My biggest complaint about this book is the gratuitous sexual content. Almost none of it was relevant to the plot or plausible in any way. This seems to be a staple of the mass-market paperback, but one would think that the murderous cannibals would be enough to hold our attention. After a while, it became really stupid and offputting. At the end of the book, there are a couple chapters from Laymon's other book, "Beware," and it looks like this book follows along the same lines. I found myself thinking, "Wow. Dude writes an awful lot about rape."

The interesting thing about this book is that it was originally published in the 80's as a much different book. In the introduction, the author's daughter explains how her father's book was heavily changed by the publisher to the point that it didn't even make sense anymore. Richard Laymon always lamented that the manuscript had been revised so much that he would never be able to put it back to the way it was. His daughter did a whole lot of digging, and was able to piece it back together, and here it is. From how the original is described, it certainly sounds like this is an improvement.

First off this is a review of the newly released "Patched back together" version touted as "Restored and Uncut." I have never read the Warner Brothers version which I am told hacked the original story to bits. There is a short (as in 5 pages or so) intro at the beginning of this book by Kelly Laymon who stated that they put the book back together in its original form for this release. Apparently Richard Laymon was always upset at the treatment his novel was given by Warner Brothers.

The actual story in this book is very short, just over 200 pages. Then you have about 30 pages or so of "Beware" which is being re-released soon. The story itself starts off very quickly; within the first two pages the baddies make their first appearance. The book is very sparse as far as characterization, so even at the end you really don't know anything at all about these characters. The book follows two sets of tourists, a family and a set of two twenty something women, who are captured and set out as a sacrifice for the local cannibal tribe. They escape and the rest of the book is one VERY long chase scene. There really isn't much more than that... it's just a whole lot of running, hiding, getting caught, running some more. There is a little bit of characterization with one of the characters losing their sanity (don't want to give away who or how)... however the change that occurs happens in less than 24 hours so it's a bit of a stretch to buy into.

As with any Laymon book there is a lot of sex, and rapes, and some gore... but the gore was a bit disappointing. Perhaps I'm just war hardened after reading so many horror books, but I never once found myself cringing. I would have to think that Laymon was going for an "Offseason" type book with this, unfortunately the sheer terror of "Offseason" was not there, nor was this as gory. I also found this to be a bit sparse on "meat to the story." Generally Laymon has a pretty good plan with his books, true I've never been a fan of his characters, but generally he has a pretty interesting plot lined up for the reader. Unfortunately when the possibility of a really interesting turn in the plot comes up, it is downplayed and left unexplained. In the end I really felt that there should have been more to this book... another hundred pages would have worked well, and perhaps that hundred pages is out there but was missed when they put this book back together.

In all it's an okay book, just not one of Laymon's better works. I'm not sure that he would have released it the way it is had he been alive. Still, if you are looking for a short, quick read about a bunch of people running away and getting naked... this is the book for you!