Savage

Whitechapel, November 1888: Jack the Ripper is committing his last known murder and beneath the bed on which he’s butchering his victim cowers a fifteen-year-old boy. So begins the adventures of Trevor Bentley: a boy who embarked on an errand of mercy and ended up on a quest for vengeance a boy who will bring the horrors of the Ripper to the New World.

From Publishers Weekly

Relating a gruesome story through the first-person narrative of an ingenuous 15-year-old boy, horror novelist Laymon ( The Stake ) appears to aim at the complex tone of Huckleberry Finn . He doesn't even come close, although that parallel might explain his London-born narrator's curiously un-British speech patterns ("gas lamps didn't give off a whole lot of light"). After witnessing Jack the Ripper's final murder on the streets of Whitechapel in 1888, Trevor Bentley is pursued by the psychopath into the Thames and ends up as his prisoner on a yacht bound for America. Improbable plot twists take both characters to Arizona, where the Ripper wreaks havoc while Trevor encounters a couple of snake-oil salesmen, rides with a bandit gang, becomes a crack shot and falls in love with pert, 16-year-old Jesse Sue Longley. The young couple survive a gore-splattered encounter with the Ripper in an Arizona cave, going on to marriage and a career in the snake-oil business. The grisly mutilation scenes induce no horror, Trevor's unrelenting innocence becomes tiresome, and his byplay with Jesse skirts soft-core kiddy-porn. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In 1888, Following a disturbance at home, Trevor Bentley's mother sends the 15-year-old to find his uncle, a constable on the London police force. Trevor embarks on a bizarre sequence of adventures, beginning with his witnessing Jack the Ripper at work. Over the next few months, the Ripper and Trevor pursue each other across the Atlantic and on to Arizona, sometimes exchanging roles of hunter and the hunted. Laymon's other horror novels include The Stake (St. Martin's, 1992) and, under the pseudonym Richard Kelly, Midnight's Lair (St Martin's, 1991). He is an accomplished wordsmith, but Savage 's plot falters with too many improbabilities and the author's denigrating peep show presentation of his women characters. Not a necessary puchase.- Robert Jordan, Univ. of Iowa, Iowa CityCopyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Laymon's hero, 15-year-old Brit Trevor Bentley, has a run-in with none other than Jack the Ripper himself in London's East End in 1888. Before he knows it, Trevor finds himself shanghaied to America by the evil Ripper, and after escaping the murderer, the young man has adventures in New York and points west before a final confrontation in, believe it or not, Arizona Territory. Laymon's basic premise is sound, as the real-life Ripper suddenly vanished; it's entirely possible that he just skipped town. However, the book's style, modeled after the adventure novels of Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain, is not a good marriage with the gruesome butcherings administered by the Ripper. Virtually every person Trevor encounters becomes a victim of the killer, setting up a revenge motif as the lad feels obligated to bring the wily Ripper to justice. Breathlessly, Laymon puts Trevor through a sexual encounter with an older woman, an initiation into a band of Wild West desperadoes, and other adventures worthy of a Huck Finn, always with the gory details of Ripper dismemberments hovering in the shadows. Savage is interesting, with its likable (and despicable) characters, but its folksy style coupled with sizable buckets of blood may be off-putting. Joe Collins

From Kirkus Reviews

At their best, Laymon's cackling horrors (The Stake, 1991; Night Visions 7, 1989) are the nastiest around--sleek, black- humored, skirting (if not slipping over) the edge of pornoviolence. Here, though, he injects them into a floundering picaresque historical about Jack the Ripper--set partly in the Old West- -resulting in his only seriously dull book yet. Even Laymon's usual thrumming prose is missing here, replaced by a faux-plucky narration (``It wasn't a job I could walk away from''; ``Right then I vowed to save her'') by 15-year-old Londoner Trevor Bentley, who, one dark-and-stormy night in 1988, goes searching for a bobby to corral the lout who's beaten his mom. Wandering the streets, Trevor is attacked by thugs who strip him; seeking clothes, he breaks into an apartment but hides under the bed when the occupant returns--a whore accompanied by none other than the Ripper, who mutilates the woman while the boy cowers inches below: a wicked beginning that Laymon soon squanders. Trevor follows ``the fiend'' only to be shanghaied--along with luscious young Trudy Armitage--aboard the Armitage family yacht, which the Ripper has pirated, aiming to sail to the fresh killing-ground of America. Sundry tortures, mostly of Trudy, make the voyage pass quickly; arriving in the US, the Ripper rips Trudy and escapes, trailed by Trevor, who loses his prey but is taken in by a retired general and his daughter, who tutors the boy in sex. Long months later, reading of savage murders in Tombstone, Trevor rides the rails west, where he takes up with outlaws, dallies with yet another pretty girl, and, at last, confronts the Ripper in a blood- spouting finale. Laymon dedicates this meandering mistake to his agent, who, he says, suggested ``an English setting...so this book is your fault.'' Okay--but Laymon himself should have known better. And next time, with luck, will. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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 twenty 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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