The Stake - Softcover

Richard Laymon

3.83

3,220 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0786012587 ISBN 13: 9780786012589

Publisher: Pinnacle Books, 2000

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Discovering the murdered body of high-school senior Bonnie Saxon, who was impaled by a wooden stake through the heart, writer Larry Dunbar learns of a madman's obsession with ridding the earth of vampires. Reprint.

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About the Author:

Richard Laymon was born in Chicago in 1947 and grew up in California. Four of his books have been shortlisted for the Bram Stoker Award, which he won in 2001 with THE TRAVELLING VAMPIRE SHOW. Among his many acclaimed works of horror and suspense are THE STAKE, SAVAGE, AFTER MIDNIGHT and the four novels in the Beast House Chronicles: THE CELLAR, THE BEAST HOUSE, THE MIDNIGHT TOUR and FRIDAY NIGHT IN BEAST HOUSE. He died in February 2001.

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.

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