Craig's review - 3 march 2008
If you have never read Richard Laymon's work and have a couple of hours to kill, ‘Friday Night in Beast House' (new Headline edition, 2007) is a decent start to largely-overlooked master of horror.
‘Friday Night…' was released posthumously after Laymon's untimely death in 2001. It takes the Beast House story from the previously-released trilogy (The Cellar, The Beast House, and The Midnight Tour) and gives it a unique twist in novella format. The protagonist, Mark, is a typical teenager, a local of Malcasa, trying to summon the courage to ask the girl of his dreams, Alison, on a first date. When he finally does, Alison accepts with one condition – the date will take place after midnight at Beast House. For the uninitiated, Beast House is a landmark Malcasa house where events of horrible depravity took place, victims raped and mutilated by human-like, hairless beasts. The killings supposedly stopped, it now cashes in on its notoriety by operating as a tourist destination. Mark must sneak Alison inside this attraction, satisfy her strange obsession, and hopefully get lucky.
Such a challenge makes for an interesting development, where Mark resorts to sneaking inside Beast House as a pretend tourist, then hides in the actual tunnel used by the beasts to crawl into the cellar. When Mark finds a pair of spectacles in the tunnel, which he knows never belonged to the documented victims, a nice moment of shattering nerves takes place. However, I do not think Laymon took such a discovery far enough – perhaps Mark could have crept further through the tunnel system, panicking, as he was forced to do near the novella's end?
This is inherently the start of the flaws of this work. It is a novella, yes, and so the plot rockets along with time constraints, but aspects such as emotion are just not developed enough. Mark's self-doubt and hormonally-overcharged obsession with the female form initially makes for an interesting character. But after the first hundred pages the story almost forgets these traits. When it first seems he'd have a mild stroke from touching Alison, anywhere, he is soon holding her hand, leading her around, and, well… you'll have to read the ending. There is little thought to such grand steps though, and this is disappointing.
The story also takes big steps in making you think Mark and Alison will enter the mysterious Kutch house, which has a tunnel system attached to Beast House, then completely halts such an idea with an end twist. Said twist is both good and bad – while it makes perfect sense, and is a typical sexually-explicit scene only Laymon could write, I really wanted to see what would happen in the Kutch house. It is if the ending is tacked on, perhaps ready for a re-write before Laymon died. I couldn't help but think of posthumous work from other creative people, even rap artist Tupac Shakur – he recorded hundreds of vocals for unreleased songs, and to this day his albums still appear (after over a decade since his death), but only about ten percent of them actually sound like the end product he would have approved of whilst alive.
I cannot forget Richard Laymon's death (of a heart attack) since it was on my birthday, Valentine's Day. I fondly remember reading Laymon as a teenager, a graduation from masters of youth horror such as Christopher Pike and RL Stine (though it should be noted a strong body of Laymon's work is not for the faint-hearted – most contain graphic violence and sex scenes). I was pleased to read this work and remember such reading journeys, but couldn't help but feel that something was missing in this volume. I am not quite sure why Hodder Headline decided to reprint this novel, in that this new edition has no further material beyond the story – no extended notes about the writer and his career (from the brief biography on the first page, you may be mistaken he was still alive), no notes on the story or the previous Beast House versions, and so on.
Deconstruction aside, as stated before, a couple of hours reading this novella would not be the biggest mistake you will ever make. Laymon's writing is both simple and effective, with a blistering pace that captivates you to the end. Give it a try, then you will be compelled to read his meatier volumes.
