The fascinating, though much crammed universe of vampire stories didn't pass
unnoticed to the fervid creativity of such a prolific author as Richard Laymon,
who weaved a story that's easily going to keep you on the edge of your seat,
tension-filled enough to make you relapse into your forgotten nail-biting
habit.
Larry
Dunbar is a horror writer whose career is satisfactory but certainly lacking
the boost of a good story to make him hit the bestseller list. The hint for a
possible blockbuster soon crosses his way, though, as he discovers the
mummified corpse of a woman during a jaunt outdoors with his wife and friends
in a California ghost town. The discovery would be creepy enough, happening
under the creaky stairs of a musty, abandoned hotel, even if the body didn't
lay in a casket, gruesomely impaled by a stake in its chest. Larry reluctantly
abandons the coffin and its disquieting content, only to be haunted in the
following days by the obsessive, recurring thought of the girl. Was she a
vampire? Or was she just the victim of a ghastly murder? He will start a
compelling search to find out more about her, her past and the occurence of her
death, wondering in a growing fever what would happen if he removed that stake.
Meanwhile, Larry's daughter's life will be plagued by other, more
"real" horrors, as she has to face another, possibly more vicious
kind of monster.
I
thought the story to be extremely well deviced, studded with creepy scenes and
suspense moments which were undoubtedly well intertwined. The action is tense
and there were parts where I actually found myself dashing through the pages,
eager to know what I was in for. The classic vampire lore is both embraced and
revised by Laymon's original approach, so that readers who're accustomed to
shiny eyeteeth and homosexual blood-swiggers will find a different note's being
played here. Much less "vampirism", in fact, can be seen in "The
Stake" than you could find in any Anne Rice's work, being this whole story
more centered around actual human beings than around your standard garlic-loathers.
A further proof is obviously the fact that the book also features a second main
thread - the other side of the vise that's crushing the Dunbars - where we
follow the steps of Lane, Larry's sixteen years-old daughter. This parallel
story is certainly a bit strained (the family seems to be a receptacle of bad
luck!), as well as more conventional, but it acquires a strenght of its own as
the chapters flow, providing the reader with an extra supply of suspense.
The
main characters are obviously Larry and his daughter, whose fears, obsessions
and uncertainties we progressively get into. I especially appreciated the
former, a wavering man caught in a haunting situation, while the latter
appeared a trifle unconvincing in a
couple of situations. At the beginning I had the gnawing feeling I wouldn't
find a good characterization, since the first dialogues sounded rather flat,
and sex fixations seemed to be not only an underlying element, but a
predominant one. After some time, instead, I was relieved to see that, at least
as the main characters were concerned, Laymon had honed his scalpel to give his
heroes a more complex shape and a more solid credibility.
Just
a few words about the ending. Not the best part of the book, honestly, because
in spite of the thrilling atmosphere that leads us to the final part, things
seem to wrap up a bit too quickly (mmm…predictably?). Ok, it is just my humble
point of view, but I'd say that after pumping for hours in his balloon, RL just
made it loudly deflate, instead of pricking the tense surface of its creation
with a needle for the final bang.
Definitely an easy, entertaining read, where
suspense teases you without pausing once. 7
½ /10