The Stake: A corpse holds deadly secrets…

An innocent woman... or a vampire? The Stake is a spine-chilling tale of horror by Richard Laymon, perfect for fans of Stephen King and Clive Barker.'Laymon uses a typewriter ribbon soaked in cold blood' - Burt HirschfeldIn an abandoned hotel in a Californian ghost town, horror writer Larry Dunbar and his friends make a chilling discovery. By chance they stumble on a coffin hidden under the stairs. Within lies the corpse of a naked female - with a stake through its heart. Was she the innocent victim of a gruesome murder? Or was she a vampire? There's only one way for Larry to solve the mystery - he must pull out the stake...What readers are saying about The Stake: 'A totally brilliant and vibrant read, the storyline was always nail biting''The characters are richly developed, and the story is a real page turner; so much so you end up hoping you never reach the end''Richard Laymon is the king of horror'

From Publishers Weekly

A novelist worries about the stake driven through the heart of a presumed vampire in this chilling horror story by the author of Flesh. Larry Durban, his neighbor Pete and their wives find the body of the young woman hidden in the basement of a ghost-town hotel. Pete persuades Larry, who has started writing a vampire novel, to bring the body home. Hoping for a great PR stunt, Pete plans to film the removal of the stake. But Larry has second thoughts. An old man tried to kill them when they picked up the coffin, suggesting that he, for one, believes in vampires. And Larry starts to have disturbing dreams about his "houseguest," whose finger bears a class ring identifying her as "Bonnie" and a onetime student at the high school that his own teenage daughter, Lane, attends. Even more disturbing is the deepening relationship between Lane and her English teacher, Hal Kramer. Early on, Laymon shows Kramer engaging in a bloody murder, thereby raising the possibility of a connection to Bonnie. By studying old newspaper clippings, Larry learns that numerous young women had disappeared at the same time as Bonnie, but surely, he tells himself, these were innocents, not vampires. By this point, the reader shares Larry's doubts, and the tension becomes electric.The novel's only flaw may be overindulgence in dialogue. But its lighthearted tone sets up some white-knuckle moments, and the ending is more than worthy of Laymon's buildup. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Laymon's first hard-cover since his first book (The Cellar, 1980, not reviewed)--and a fine return it is as this high- spirited, prolific horror writer weighs in with a typically brisk and black-humored yarn about what a fellow horror author and his pals do when they find the stake of the title--embedded in a mummified corpse. Is the corpse a vampire? The Colorado ghost town where horror novelist Larry Durban, his neighbor Pete, and their wives find the body is eerie enough, but none of the four believes in vampires--although whoever killed the woman must have thought her a monster, and wouldn't all this make a nifty nonfiction book? So Larry writes several chapters about finding the corpse and about how he and Pete later returned to the hotel and stole the body, now hidden in Larry's garage awaiting his book-in-progress's climax, the pulling of the stake. Larry postpones that climax, though, because as he digs out the identity of the body--local high-school cheerleader Bonnie Saxon, a dead-ringer for his own daughter Lane but murdered 20 years back, along with several other girls, by one Uriah Radley--he becomes erotically obsessed with Bonnie, waking up next to her corpse. Meanwhile, in a major, thematically obvious subplot--monsters do exist--a real-life fiend invades Larry's family: Lane's English teacher, handsome Mr. Kramer, who molests and murders one of Lane's classmates, then sets his sights on flirtatious Lane, eventually raping her. And at the same time, Uriah Radley, escaped from an asylum and gripping a stake, tracks after Larry & Co., whom he believes to be vampires. All parties converge in a violent and twisty climax that spirals into a truly surprising, and surprisingly happy, ending. Spooky, sexy, and lots of nasty fun. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Reviews

News