Endless Tripe

by Tony Fonseca

01/25/2005

Laymon, Richard. Endless Night. New York: Dorchester-Leisure, 2004. c. 1993. 480 p.

A teenaged girl, clad mainly in a long nightshirt, spends nearly half a novel running through the suburban Los Angeles landscape as she tries to escape a sadistic killer who fantasizes about raping her and who, on a couple of occasions, manages to grab her leg and get somewhat of a glance of her panties. Sound familiar? Well, if you answered “sounds like a reissue of one of those Richard Laymon hack-jobs,” you’d be right, especially if you sarcastically pronounced the author’s name as “lame man.”

Originally published in 1993, Endless Night tells the story of a young girl named Jody Fargo, who witnesses the ritualistic murders of her best friend Evelyn’s family (and watches Evelyn get shish-kabobbed) during a sleepover. Only two people escape the murder house that night—Jody and Evelyn’s younger brother Andy—and the two lead a deranged killer named Simon through their pink collar neighborhood for what seems like an eternity. But Simon is no ordinary hacker (there is that word “hack” again; just can’t seem to shake it when discussing this novel). He is a member of the “Krulls,” a group of animalistic male humans who base their name and raison d’etre, to murder, hack, and revel in gore, on an earlier Laymon work, The Woods Are Dark (Warner, 1981).

The Krulls pick a family home at random, and clothed only in human skins procured from earlier victims, as well as the scent of these victim’s entrails, break into it in the middle of the night, each armed with a favorite weapon of choice. They then go from room to room, disposing of each family member in the ghastliest way possible, keeping the bodies or body parts as trophies. When they are finished wreaking havoc on polite society, they burn the house to destroy all evidence, and bide their time until they once again feel the need to murder. But for Simon, something goes terribly wrong on this particular night of hunting, and he is left behind by the Krulls to catch the girl and boy that got away. The story then alternates between Jody’s point-of-view as she runs for her life and Simon’s musings as he speaks into a recorder to preserve his rape and mutilation fantasies for posterity.

If Laymon does have strength as a writer, it is his penchant for jumping right into the action with little or no exposition, as he does in Endless Night. Evelyn and her family are dispatched within the novel’s first five pages, and the chase begins almost immediately thereafter (after a bit of schoolboy silliness on Laymon’s part when sixteen year old Jody has to wake twelve-year-old Andy from typical teenaged boy fantasy and then we, the readers, have to suffer through Andy’s misunderstanding of the situation). Readers are then taken for a joy ride which alternates between the will to survive and the will to brutally kill. This is, after all, widely accepted as one of Laymon’s most sadistic fictional excursions.

But as usual for Laymon, there is very little character depth and almost no interest in creative description, other than what we hear of Simon’s fascination with Jody’s young body. This reviewer certainly is not prudish, as those of you who have read my reviews of Charlee Jacob and John Shirley can attest, but one has to draw the line somewhere, and it seems to me that Laymon’s sexual violence always crosses that line, into the realm of the gratuitous and masturbatory.

Where a better writer would have delved more into the psychology of masculinity and the desensitization that modern culture, with its championing of violence as a commodity, could naturally produce a group of men who find their spirituality only in mindless violence, Laymon just, for want of a better term, “krulls” his way through the text, skewering, stabbing, shooting and chopping. Reading one of his novels is often like sitting through a Schwarzenegger film while waiting for someone to say something thought-provoking. If you want something that is more than murder and mayhem you have about as much chance of getting it as a deranged killer has of catching a cop’s daughter. It simply ain’t gonna happen, and you should kick yourself for ever believing the result would be anything but the cliché.