Blood Games

They meet for one week every year, five young women, best friends since college, in search of fun and thrills. Each year they choose a different place for their reunion. This year it’s Helen’s choice, and she chose the Totem Pole Lodge. Bad choice.The Totem Pole Lodge is a deserted resort hotel deep in the woods with a gory, shocking past. Helen has a macabre streak and she can’t wait to tell her friends all about what happened at the lodge and why it’s now abandoned. But Helen and the others are in for a nasty surprise. The resort isn’t quite as deserted as they think. And not all the gruesome events at the Totem Pole Lodge are in its past. The worst are still to come…

From Publishers Weekly

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. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

A former President of the Horror Writers Association, Laymon has written over thirty novels, more than sixty-five literary short stories (which were published in Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock and Cavalier), poetry, crime fiction, two suspense novels, a Western, and two romance novels. Until recently, his books were unavailable in the US for more than 20 years. His novel Flesh was named Best Horror Novel of 1988 by Science Fiction Chronicle, and both Flesh and Funland were nominated for the Bram Stoker Award. He won this award posthumously in 2001 for The Traveling Vampire Show. Richard Laymon died in 2001 of a heart attack.

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