To Boldly Go Where Many Have Gone Before

To Boldly Go Where Many Have Gone Before--Yet Again

01/17/2005

Laws, Stephen. The Wyrm. New York: Leisure, 2004. ¸1987. 342 p.

If there's one phrase that an astute reader has to hate seeing in the Publisher's Description on the back of a new novel, it would have to be "centuries old vampire." It's as if every horror writer has to try on fangs at least once in his or her career. When writing The Wyrm, Stephen Laws, whose Darkfall turned out to be one of the most interesting re-released novels of 2003, must have felt this pressure to create yet another Child of the Night. Perhaps he was bitten by the successes of writers like Rice and Yarbro. Or perhaps Richard Laymon, undead in the publishing world himself, floated outside the windows of Leisure Book executives one dark night in 2003 and infected them, causing them to unearth this very early work because of one successful re-release.

Whatever the reason, Leisure and Laws have chosen to go where just about every man (and woman) of dark letters has gone before with the 2004 edition of The Wyrm. Granted, this freshman tale is a pseudo-vampire novel at best, and it does manage to avoid most of the clichés normally associated with the spawn of Dracula, Lestat, and St. Germaine. For what it's worth, the 'wyrm'¹ as it were is not a hypnotic aristocrat; nor is he/it a rather pale, mysterious, saber-toothed Romeo. Law's marginally original creature (some of us do remember Peter Straub's Ghost Story) is a shape-shifting mass of Lovecraftian ooze, a terrifying chameleon like mist that can sense a person's greatest fear and become it. The wyrm is a monster more reminiscent of The Thing' than of Lestat. Much to some fans' delight, it is relentless and inventive in its savagery, and it really gets off on producing a lot of gore.

But alas, as with most all-powerful, unstoppable, indestructible monsters, the wyrm can be easily destroyed. After all, it's only an immortal demon with the ability to topple cars as if they were Matchbox and not BMW, crush houses as if they were made of playing cards, and rip people down the seams more easily than a child ripping apart a new rag doll she got for Christmas. And unfortunately, the monster can be 'killed' by--yet another place EVERY author has gone before--self-sacrifice. That and a Necronomicon-esque chant read from a secret book (note to self: order more MYSTERIOUS BOOKS INTENDED TO RAISE--AND VANQUISH--DEMONS for the university library).

(second note to self: find out which publisher publishes, or re-releases, such books....and write a blog entry wondering why these publishers have yet to become all-powerful....or have they....)

(final note to self: get official definition of the word cliché© from Merriam-Webster for review of novel....)

As one online reviewer of The Wyrm put it, "this book is nothing you haven't read before, and you've probably read it better." To be fair to Laws, The Wyrm is one of his early efforts, and very few authors manage a Rice or King with their first foray into the dark realms of horror. Like a youngster's work, it is derivative. Most horror aficionados, and even those of us who are just well read in the genre, will hear distinct echoes of Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos and Stoker's Dracula mythology. Although crisp for the most part, the writing is undisciplined, as Laws tends to go overboard quite often here. The obligatory final confrontation is clearly telegraphed.

Nonetheless, I could find it in myself to recommend this novel to readers looking for a summer diversion, if it were not for the fact that the characters were painted with the broadest of brushstrokes. To quote yet another online reviewer: They "seem to have been selected from Monster Movie central casting." As I've often pointed out in my reviews, readers don't read horror just for the monsters; they have to be drawn into the story by their empathy for the humans who are destroyed by the monster, or by those who eventually vanquish it. This is not going to happen when no insight is ever given into characters' personalities. If I've said it once, I'll say it again: if I stop caring about the novel's characters, about what happens to them, then I stop caring about finishing the novel.²

This is not to say that Laws does not successfully create a small town horror feel. He does that in spades, but he eschews atmosphere in favor of brutal action in this story that begins with what seems like an extraneous frame tale, where an unnamed interviewer is questioning one of the sole survivors of the night that killed some 650 people in Shillingham, trying to get to the bottom of the horror. The plot then begins in earnest, with lonely-author-suffering-from-writer's-block Michael Lambton's move from the big city to this small border village. There, he purchases a remote house in order to hide from the world, presumably to once again inspire himself to write.

In no time at all, he hits it off with Christy Warwick, who may not be 'Miss Shillingham' but is a shoe in for 'Miss Congeniality.' Despite having to take care of her increasingly insane father, the village alcoholic, she manages to hold down a job at the most posh coffee house in the village. Christy's daily walks past Michael's house eventually bring the two of them together, united by their love for the two Dobermans he keeps as pets and for security. They are thrust into each other's arms when Christy's father loses it and shoots at some highway construction workers who are trying to unearth an old gallows, so that it might be placed in a historical museum.

Both Mr. Warwick and the reader knows that something horrifying lies under the gibbet, but unfortunately, no one else in the novel figures out that you should never, ever, ever remove ANY kind of stake from a corpse in a coffin (perhaps they did not read enough of those vampire novels that crowd our book store shelves). Once the highway department, in the name of progress, removes the gibbet--and the stake at its base that is obviously inserted in some kind of a vampire--well, we've got a horror novel folks. The first killing is rather sophomoric: the worker in the pit says the corpse looked at him, goes crazy and ultimately pokes his cerebrum with shards of a glass. Then all hell breaks lose, literally.

Once the monster is out, The Wyrm goes from zero to sixty. And granted, I like speed as much as the next person, but a journey should be judged by what we see along the way and by the quality of our final destination. I can't say I was satisfied with either here. When all is said and done and read, I just didn't get much of an impression from this Laws early work. I just hope that The Wyrm, and the voluminous number of re-releases in the genre, are not a portent for the horror industry. If so, I fear that the publishing world is becoming the land of mediocrity.

¹See my review of Scott Nicholson's Harvest for my opinion of the importance of naming in horror. Despite the fact that the word 'wyrm' here refers to a specific kind of Anglo-Saxon dragon, I cannot help but think that Laws should have found a better name for his creature. Naming a monster 'the wyrm' is akin to calling those dark misgivings the main character in Harvest has 'the gloomies.' I don't see how a reader can't help but see these as unbefitting of any serious scare.

²For those of you who are not sure about what I mean here, I suggest picking up Dan Simmons' Summer of Night or Carrion Comfort, or Gary A. Braunbeck's In Silent Graves, or Mitch Cullen's Tideland, Suzy McKee Charnas's The Vampire Tapestry; Poppy Z. Brites Exquisite Corpse; or Tananarive Dues The Good House . Hopefully, you will note that it is possible to create believable, and sympathetic characters, in a horror novel.