A Woman’s Work Is Never Done
07/28/2006
Laymon, Richard. After Midnight. New York: Leisure Books, 2006. 438 p.
A lot can happen when the sun goes down and darkness creeps across a typically innocuous countryside.
In After Midnight, Richard Laymon proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt—and gives the reader yet another reason to sleep with the lights on. The novel is Alice’s story, but “Alice”—as we find out early in the novel—is not her real name. It is merely the pseudonym that this woman took in order to tell her tale without fear of retribution or the threat of a jail sentence.
Alice is a twenty-six year old woman with a less than pristine past, who lives with her best friend’s happy little family on the edge of the ominous Miller’s Woods. Too often has she been abused and ill-used by men, so she has chosen a quiet and isolated life. She inhabits the garage apartment on her friend Serena’s Property. Her pleasant routine of lounging by the pool could have continued indefinitely if she hadn’t been left alone to house sit, especially if she hadn’t looked through the glass patio door in the late hours of the evening. When Alice peered through the glass into what should have been an empty swimming pool, she saw a naked stranger under the moonlight. That, however, was just the beginning of her troubles. The man in the pool was, as Alice suspected, looking for more than just a refreshing dip. He approached the house, staring at Alice through the glass door as she watched in horror. Suffice it to say, the stranger left a nasty white DNA sample waist-high on the door.
Meanwhile, an unlucky young man named Tony misdials his ex-girlfriend’s telephone number and gets unwittingly caught up in the drama at Alice’s house.1 Unbeknownst to Alice, Tony decides to check up on her, since in his opinion she seemed unwilling to call the police about the trespasser. Yet (as our main character notes), no good deed goes unpunished. Alice, who had resolved to protect herself from the male monsters of the world once and for all, meets Tony’s arrival with a saber. Regrettably, she hadn’t known that the man on the doorstep was the concerned caller rather than the unwelcome poolside pervert.
After the antique Civil War saber meets Tony’s unsuspecting skull, Alice must begin her cover-up. She somewhat unsympathetically remarks,
When you kill someone, you’ve got to clean up afterward. Not just the body and the gore, but the rest of the pieces, too. Tripometers, telephone messages, redials, the whole nine yards. It sucks big.
Very well stated.
More goal-oriented than remorseful, she just wants to clean up, forget everything, and go on with her life. So in the wee hours of the morning, Alice sets out to dismember Tony’s body, hide it in the trunk of his car, and return the vehicle to his parking lot. When she attempts to get inside Tony’s home in an effort to destroy any evidence that she had spoken to him on the telephone just moments before his death, Alice instead finds herself face-to-face with Tony’s ex-girlfriend Judy. Unfortunately for Judy, Alice had selected the wrong address in Tony’s wallet. Alice’s next impulse is, of course, to kill Judy lest she be able to identify her. She decides to do this deed in the dark and ill-reputed Miller’s Woods.
Laymon does not, however, allow his main character to simply get rid of Judy. That would wrap up the story too neatly. Instead, Alice attempts to kill Judy by shooting her with the gun that Tony had brought on his chivalrous outing. She fails, only grazing Judy’s head. So, in yet another grand plan to free herself of all suspicion, she abuses Judy and leaves her on a picnic table, hoping to make the crime look like a rape and murder. When she returns just moments after leaving Judy’s side, she discovers that the unconscious woman is gone, but her cries are heard deep inside the forest. Alice, of course, could have been in the clear if she had let this unidentified monster finish Judy off, but she had developed a possessive attitude toward the beautiful and naive young woman. Alice concludes, “I would’ve loved to spare her, but she had to go. The thing is, I had to be the one to do it. Not this guy, whoever he might be. Not this stranger, this interloper, this thief. She was mine, not his.”
When Alice finds both Judy—who is naked and suspended from a tree—and this unwelcome interloper, the story gains momentum. Laymon’s talent for weaving twisted and page-turning yarns clearly shines through. The stranger in the woods is described as a drooling, overall-wearing, murderous rapist cannibal named Milo. He was ostensibly “slobbering all over the place as he struggled to his feet. Grunting. Naked…Coated with curly, filthy hair all the way down from his shoulders to his feet.” Thankfully, he didn’t stand a chance against Alice. In spite of this daring rescue, Alice still had conflicting feelings regarding Judy: she wouldn’t free her from the ropes, yet she couldn’t kill her either.
Over the course of the next day, Alice continues to disassociate herself from Tony’s murder and Judy’s disappearance by destroying evidence. Through some clever deception, she finds Tony’s true address and sets out to steal his answering machine tape (just in case he recorded the call from the previous night) and dial some other numbers on his telephone to free her own number from the redial. In the process, she meets and has a very short-lived, but intense, love affair with Tony’s building manager who also happens to be an up-and-coming mystery writer. Despite all of the distractions and chores, her thoughts—and her dreams during those brief moments of sleep—drift back to Judy. The two women are clearly destined to meet up again. Luckily (or unluckily, as the case may be), the midnight swimmer returns to the story, and Alice discovers that by stalking him, she can find and claim Judy.
Every step that Alice makes requires further effort to cover her tracks. She refers to the endless number of strings attached to every act as “steel wires” that are “everywhere, attached to every word out of your mouth, to your every action, to every person you encounter—and they all lead off somewhere else and drag new stuff into the picture.” The story began with Alice and the naked swimmer and eventually involves Tony, his ex-girlfriend, his building manager, Alice’s former co-worker, and a demented forest-dwelling cannibal. Indeed, it was quite a complicated and far-reaching web. The plot is so intricate and twisted that the reader will be unable, or unwilling, to escape. Dark and disturbing thoughts obviously dwell within Laymon’s imagination, yet the reader is infinitely lucky that he is willing to put them on paper.
1If Lemony Snicket had not already claimed the phrase for his popular literary series, this novel could have been aptly named “A Series of Unfortunate Events.”