Endless Night by Richard Laymon
Endless Night by Richard Laymon
471 pages
Horror / Horror
September 1993
Dorchester
https://amzn.to/4n9mUUB
This was my second pick for this month’s Richard Laymon read-a-thon. As with many of his novels, I was not sure if I had read this before since the premise started out somewhat similar to Intensity by Dean Koontz but seemed like new territory for Laymon. Not that home invasion is new for him, not by a long shot; but to have a book start with one seemed new. It is also the book most often recommended to those seeking the darkest and most extreme Laymon there is.
A sleepover gone wrong…
For a home invasion, this ranks with one of the most sudden, senseless (not in a bad way) and sick. Naked, shaven men covered in rotted blood and human skins tear through a quiet home in the dead of night, leaving an orphaned boy in their wake and one feisty teenage girl. And this is in the first few pages!
What unfolds after that is a deliciously warped story with one of my more favourite villains, Simon.
From the back cover copy:
Jody is pretty tough for a sixteen-year-old girl. That’s the only reason she’s still alive – for now. She was sleeping over at her friend Evelyn’s house when a group of killers broke in and tried to slaughter everyone. She saw Evelyn spitted on a spear, but Jody managed to escape, along with Evelyn’s little brother, Andy. — Simon was one of the killers that gruesome night. His friends have left it up to him to find the only living witnesses to their massacre. Or else they’ll butcher his family next. But Simon has his own reasons for wanting to get his hands on Jody…
So, Jody and Andy are on the run, then safe, then on the run with her father and the police, then safe, then on the run again; rinse and repeat. All the while, Simon is not only doggedly chasing them down, he is narrating his twisted desires into a tape recorder for our entertainment. This makes for a great pace, a good look at the killers psyche with a unique point of view as all we get are his thoughts on tape.
We also get his aftermath, and how this has torn Andy’s life apart. We see the destruction, the police response, and some very Scooby-Doo plans put forth by these poor young kids on the run. Some of my favourite tactics in this book are when one party brushes past the other within seconds. This is used in the beginning when the kids are hiding and the killers are nearby, used later when the police are just down the road from where Simon watches, and when the family returns home to evidence a killer was in their home not long before. This creates great tension through most of the book.
Laymon fans may delight in a little meta reference with this gang of killers. They call themselves The Killer Krulls after the Krull family in ‘some old horror novel’; that novel being unnamed but most certainly The Woods are Dark by Richard Laymon.
This story also has some highly entertaining close calls and cross-dressing capers on behalf of Simon, are maniacal killer. He is intelligent, verbose, confident and crafty so certainly more than the average slasher psychopath.
Hits and misses…
The addition of the tough and beautiful cop that catches Jody’s father’s eye is interesting, and fleshes him out a little too. While he is overwritten in a few ways, instead of the ‘family’ coming together over a meal or some clandestine sex scenes – as is tradition – we are treated to an entire chapter where everyone goes to shoot tin cans in the desert. Not being a gun fan and also wanting to get back to Simon who has a hostage and is on his way back to his Killer Krull turf, it ruined what was at that point a fairly high-tension and fun final act.
While this is called Endless Night it should be called endless long weekend since it occurs over a few days. It spans few towns and cities, however. While the season and weather is not a huge factor, there are a lot of hiding, running and road tripping to be done. Many of the scenes occur at night in houses or on the road. Not super unique or picturesque but this leans in to the Laymon trend of using commonplace settings. This could indeed have happened anywhere to anyone…
Simon says…
My top character is Simon, and it is not unusual to take a shine to a Laymon villain no matter how sick and twisted. He spends a lot of time with his killer here, and he is not the final act set-piece. That said, the end did lack fireworks for me. It just sort of fizzled out. Not what I expected from the long fuse on this plot that started out with a bang.
While Endless Night was fun and started out uniquely, I was left underwhelmed by the last few chapters. It certainly did not live up to the most extreme of Laymon; The Cellar comes to mind foremost, the ending of Cuts was exceptionally brutal, and The Woods are Dark or In the Dark had some quite shocking scenes. If you want a little more of a twisty caper in your Laymon, In the Dark or Night in the Lonesome October are good bets. Endless Night was an exercise in tension that becomes more of study on justice in the latter half.