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THE
TRAVELING VAMPIRE SHOW
By RICHARD LAYMON
(Leisure; 2000)
There was never a writer quite like the late Richard Laymon, and THE
TRAVELING VAMPIRE SHOW is among the finest of his 30-plus novels. It’s
at once a nostalgic coming-of-age fantasy in the mode of Ray Bradbury’s
classic SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES and a splatterific horrorfest of
the type Laymon specialized in.
Richard Laymon had one of the oddest careers of any
American horror writer, starting out in the late seventies-early
eighties with a succession of unassumingly packaged paperbacks like THE
CELLAR, THE WOODS ARE DARK and TREAD SOFTLY. Success was elusive, at
least until Laymon began publishing in the UK and Australia, where his
work became a phenomenon. Laymon’s novels did eventually achieve a
similar level of success in his native country, but not until after his
untimely death in 2000.
Like many of Laymon’s novels, THE TRAVELING VAMPIRE
SHOW is an expansive yet impressively contained account that takes place
over the course of a single day. 391 pages may seem excessively lengthy
for such a tale, but the novel never feels padded or overwritten in the
slightest. Lean, pared-down prose was one of Laymon’s trademarks, and is
very much a feature of this compulsive page-turner.
The set-up is simplicity itself: one day in August of
1963, sixteen-year-old Dwight and his buddies Slim, a girl, and Rusty, a
horny guy, learn of The Traveling Vampire Show, a spectacle said to
feature the world’s only captive vampire. That vamp is billed as a
beautiful woman named Valeria, set to appear at midnight in a field
bordering the rural town of Grandville, where Dwight and company reside.
The problem facing our pubescent heroes is the fact
that nobody under eighteen is allowed to see the show. They’re
captivated, however, and not about to be deterred. What follows is an
odyssey of apprehension, disillusionment, capture, escape,
disappearance, sacrifice and, finally, balls-out horror. Along the way
we’re introduced to several memorable characters, including Dwight’s
alluring stepsister Lee, Rusty’s neurotic sibling Bitsy, the Vampire
Show’s ultra-creepy proprietor Julian, and of course the aforementioned
Valeria, who doesn’t actually appear until the final chapters but makes
quite an impression once she does.
The novel contains some false notes here and there.
There are an unconvincing number of beautiful women in this small town
(apparently a breeding ground for supermodels), and an overabundance of
elaborate flashbacks that compromise Laymon’s otherwise impeccably
constructed narrative. But those are minor quibbles, as this is a
sterling example of hard-driving, good-time horror topped off with a
sharp, satisfying and totally unexpected jolt in the final pages.
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