Maxima Library

They meet up for one week every year: Helen, Cora, Vivian, Finley and Abilene — five former co-eds in search of thrills and adventure. Just like they enjoyed together at college. This time it's Helen's choice. Helen, the fat girl with a taste for horror, the brainy one with a fear of being caught alone in the shower by an unknown assailant with a sharp knife and a thirst for blood…

For this year's reunion, Helen has picked The Totem Pole Lodge, a deserted hotel in the backwoods with a sinister past. She's looking forward to the moment when she'll tell the others the gory details. But that's before night falls and the girls find the Lodge is not as deserted as they thought. And before Helen goes into the shower. Alone.

***

In the early 1990s, as the horror market bottomed in the U.S., several established American authors, including Laymon (To Wake the Dead, etc.), were unable to find domestic publishers for their work. Laymon continued to hit bestseller lists overseas during this period, though, and this is one of the novels he wrote during that time. Like so much of his mid-career work, it's a middling effort, and it's also a mixed bag-nearly literally, as it offers a present-day scenario interspersed with flashbacks that are, in effect, standalone short stories. In the present, five young alumni of Belmore University are on their annual get-together; this year, the choice of what to do has fallen to Helen, a horror buff, who arranges for the group to camp out at a deserted backwoods lodge where guests were slaughtered by locals several years back. In time, the group encounter various townsfolk, including a witch, whom they must fight for their lives, resulting in a characteristic Laymon bloodbath. The action here is fast but predictable. Of greater interest are the flashbacks, showing first how the gang got together, then detailing their various exploits-taking revenge on some frat guys by setting fire to their house, on a cruel dean by trashing her office, on a nasty homeowner on Halloween by destroying his living room; seducing a young male surfer during a foggy nighttime trip along the California coast, etc. It's in these scenes that Laymon displays some, but not much, of the surreal nightmarish sensibility that hallmarked his great later work (The Traveling Vampire Show, etc.). Overall, then, this is brisk but routine entertainment from the controversial author, who died in 2001.

No suspense collection is complete without this anthology. Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, the stories in this volume represent many of the biggest names in detective and suspense fiction: Ellery Queen, Harold Q. Masur, Celia Fremlin, Jack Ritchie, Patricia Highsmith and Bill Pronzini are only a few of the prize-winning authors in this amazing volume.

It's only a trip to the movies but it turns into Marty's worst nightmare when she sees the guy behind her in the audience. Willy. The man who burst into her house and raped her ten years ago. Now he's out of jail and back in town - and looking for Marty. Marty's date says he's going to fix the creep. And the way he goes about it makes Marty sick. But when it comes to sick, there's no one to match Willy. He's a fiend...

FIENDS is the lead-off novella in this collection of horror stores by Richard Laymon, "one of the best writers working in the genre today" - Cemetery Dance

"Laymon has established a style that has often been imitated but never equalled: plunging, pull-out-the-stops, no-limits, in-your-face, shock-packed, take-off-the-top-of-your-head, gonzo suspense and horror that will appal some people and exhilarate others...I hope that you enjoy this collection of stories as much as I do" - from the Introduction by Dean Koontz.

 The collection's stories: Fiends, Kitty Litter, The Bleeder, Desert Pickup, The Mask, Eats, The Hunt, Slit, Out of the Woods, Stiff Intruders, Special, Joyce, A Good Secret Place.

No one in town has ever seen anything like it: a slimy, mobile tube of glistening yellow flesh with dull, staring eyes and an obscene, probing mouth. But the real horror is not what it looks like, or what it does when it invades your fleshbut what it makes you do to others.

Спойлер

Wie böse Deine Fantasie auch sein mag - die von Richard Laymon ist schlimmer! Neala und ihre Freundin Sherri nutzen ihre Ferien, um durch die Berge Kaliforniens zu wandern. Sie ahnen nicht, dass man in dem Städtchen Barlow schon auf sie lauert. Die Bewohner verschleppen die Frauen in den Wald und fesseln sie an Bäume - dann laufen sie davon und lassen die beiden zurück. Die Gefangenen können nur warten. Auf die Dunkelheit ... den Wahnsinn ... die Schmerzen ... die hungrigen Krulls. THE WOODS ARE DARK ist ein echter Horror-Klassiker. Laymons schockierendster Roman - erstmals auf Deutsch und in der ungekürzten Originalfassung. Mit einem Vorwort von Kelly Laymon, der Tochter des Autors, und einem Nachwort von Brett McBean.

Originaltitel: The Woods are Dark

Aus dem Englischen von Michael Krug

A holiday idyll that turns into a nightmare. Eight people take a yachting cruise in the Bahamas and find that they are not alone.

Melanie Conway è una bella violinista spesso preda di inquietanti visioni di morte. Durante un concerto, si accascia per terra e il fidanzato Bodie la sente parlare di una tragedia imminente… Penelope Conway è perfino più seducente della sorella e, pur prendendosi sul serio come scrittrice, viene notata dagli uomini solo per le sue curve e, per giunta, è perseguitata da telefonate oscene… Attratto a un certo punto da entrambe le ragazze, Bodie si trova coinvolto in una vicenda agghiacciante, grondante sangue…

When a teenage girl is terrorized by a madman out for blood, could it have something to do with what happened to her mother so long ago at the abandoned house out on the lake?

From Publishers Weekly

When Laymon (

Island

, etc.) died in 2001, he left behind numerous unpublished novels that Leisure has been issuing. This one is good but not great, combining the savagery of his earlier work (

Beast House

, etc.) with the spooky wonder of his later books (

The Traveling Vampire Show

, etc.). As the story begins, we see Candyman, a serial killer, at work, then observe teen Deana West watch in horror as her boyfriend is mowed down by a car—driven by Candyman? The narrative then flashes back 20 years to a summer Deana’s mother, Leigh, spent in rural Wisconsin; this, the strongest section, details eerie, erotic nighttime forays by Leigh and her lover, a weird local boy, that result in the boy’s accidental death. Back in the present, Leigh gets involved with a cop who’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and she and Deana, who’s taken to nighttime jogging and who herself gets involved with a mysterious neighbor and his odd, psychic sister, are menaced by the driver of the car that killed Deana’s boyfriend. The plot is too complicated, although Laymon does tie all the strands up in a messy knot; but what counts here, as usual for Laymon, is the white-hot pacing, the rivers of blood (which will dismay mainstream readers) and, above all, the memorable evocation of the fathomless mystery of the moonlit hours.

A horror writer, Larry Dunbar uncovers the body of a high school girl, who had been sacrificed on the altar of a madman's obsession to rid the Earth of a vampire's curse. A world of horrors was born the day the stake was driven into the girl's heart, and Dunbar wants to pull it out.

When the one-night-only Traveling Vampire Show arrives in town, promising the only living vampire in captivity, beautiful Valeria, three local teenages venture where they do not belong, and discover much more than they bargained for.

Two families have come to the California mountains expecting a fun weekend camping trip. What they will find instead is terror in the form of a violent psychopath and his mother, a powerful witch.

(Also published as Dark Mountain)