Darkness, Tell Us

It started as a game. Six college kids at a party. Then someone suggested they try the Ouija board. The board that Corie had hidden in the back of her closet and swore never to touch again. Not after what happened last time. Not after Jake’s death…They were only playing around, but the Ouija board worked, all right. Maybe too well. A spirit who called himself Butler began to send them messages—and make demands. Butler promised them a hidden treasure if only they would follow his directions and head off to a secluded spot in the mountains…A wild, isolated spot where anything could be waiting for them. Treasure or death. Or Butler himself.

From Publishers Weekly

When horror author Laymon (Island) died in 2001, he left behind several unseen novels (and all signs indicate that he, unlike some other dead authors who continue to publish, actually wrote these books). This newest is middling Laymon-which means that it moves like a bat out of hell and features gobs of titillating sex and jaw-dropping gore, plus a gentle underpinning of emotional truth. Laymon's strength is writing about adolescents; the six highlighted here are college students, three male and three female, who, during a party at the house of one of their professors, are prompted by a Ouija board to look for a "4-T-U-N-E" at a remote California locale, Calamity Peak. Road-tripping there right away, the six students-two of whom mate in the book's affecting romantic subplot-eventually encounter a machete-wielding madman who terrorizes them. Meanwhile, as depicted in cross-cut chapters, the professor and her new lover, concerned about the students' impetuousness, follow the six, only to fall prey to the madman themselves. A skeleton, a family secret, several surprising revelations and two more crazies thicken the plot, which is no more realistic than a fever dream but is embedded in hard reality through the sensuous immediacy of Laymon's prose. Any reader averse to high tension and rampant salaciousness should skip this over-the-top tale, but Laymon fans-an ever-growing group-will embrace it as wild, dirty fun.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 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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