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3.44 AVERAGE
3.44 AVERAGE
This reminded me of a bad 80s slasher film which usually i could forgive as some pulpy fun but for me i couldnt stand it. Lots of misogyny, lots of focus on womens bodies rather than the plot and I hate sexual assault in my books. Somethings if its a brief mention i can stomach it but it was too graphic for me and pointless. Apparently this is something common in this authors writing so should of done more research in the book store but wont be picking up any of his books
Content Warnings
Graphic: Misogyny, Sexism, Sexual assault
If I had to pick one word to describe "No Sanctuary", I'd go with 'schizophrenic'. Instead of one story with one main focus like most of his works, this is Laymon balancing three plots (two major, one minor) that start off having nothing to do with one another, yet all come to a head in the final pages. Laymon's gone down the multi-plot route before, most notably with "Quake" where his omniscient narrator swaps between three major focal points, but while "Quake" tells the story of three different groups on the day of a major earthquake, the string tying them all together is the family unit: a father at work, a daughter at school, and a mother trapped under some debris at home. The tie-in for "Quake" is immediately obvious: family seeking reunification after disaster. The tie-in for "No Sanctuary" is a mystery up until the climax, and Laymon includes a couple of nice red herrings, head-fakes, and weirdos that will make you wonder if there isn't more going on in the hills of California than meets the eye.
The book starts with a home invasion: pretty young Rhonda, alone in the house on Saturday night while her parents visit Aunt Betty, is abducted from her bedroom by a man who promises he won't hurt her if she just does what he says. Either she doesn't follow his instructions or he's not good at keeping promises, because three days later her body turns up a long way from home.
We jump to Rick's bedroom where he's awakened by a phone call from Bert (call her 'Bertha' and die), his girlfriend. The hour is early, but vacation waits for no one, and they've got a long drive ahead of them. Rick hates camping because he broke his leg hiking with his family when he was fourteen, but Bert's got the outdoors on the brain, and rather than see her hike the wilderness alone and unprotected, Rick's going to push down the nightmares and try to make it through with a little help from his two other friends: a fifth of bourbon and a loaded revolver. Neither of them were on Bert's packing list, but he's not leaving the city without them, and with any luck he won't need either one, but this is a Laymon story so you know the chances of that are slim to none.
Once Rick and Bert get underway, we meet Gillian O'Neill. Landlady for a twenty-unit apartment building, she receives some bad news: her office manager Odie and his wife Grace are leaving, heading back to the country to take care of Odie's invalid father and a soon-t0-arrive baby. The stress of having to find a new manager triggers Gillian's compulsion, and she goes out house-hunting...but not in the traditional sense. Gillian's hobby is finding homes where the family's gone away for a while, break in, live there for while, then skip out before they return with no one the wiser. She's got cover stories galore, she takes all the precautions, and she's only been surprised twice in all the years she's been doing it. By now she has the routine down pat for canvassing the neighborhood, picking a target, and making herself at home.
The house she selects (purely on the basis of it having a nice hot tub) belongs to one Frederick Holden, and if anyone should happen to ask, she's just house-sitting for her dear Uncle Fred while he's out of town. It doesn't hurt that Holden's neighbor, Jerry, is a good lookin' dude with a fine swimming pool...good looking enough to make her start breaking rules about not fraternizing with neighbors.
Unfortunately for Gillian, 'Uncle' Frederick has an obsessions with slasher films, horror novels, True Crime books, S&M sex, and serial killers that would make even Albert Fish or Edmund Kemper tell him to dial it down a notch...and after discovering this, Gillian realizes she has no idea when he's coming back. Naturally she packs her stuff and leaves immediately, because she realizes she's become the inadvertent final girl in a horror story, and no, sorry, just kidding, she doesn't because this is a Laymon novel and did I mention what a nice swimming pool Jerry has...?
Gillian isn't the only glutton for punishment in all this though. Rick and Bert find the camping trails and paths far from deserted, and their first encounter with Jase, Luke, and Wally, a trio of male hikers, is enough to bring the awful memories of what really happened to Rick on that earlier vacation crashing back into his brain, especially when Jase, the leader of the group, starts admiring Bert's landscape a little too closely. Instincts on edge from the encounter, the pair discuss heading a different direction from the three young men, but the arrival of Bonnie and Andrea, a pair of pretty university students from Santa Cruz taking the same trail, changes their mind. Unwilling to leave the girls to face the obnoxious guys alone, they become a party of four, driving a nice wedge of sexual tension between Rick and Bert once it becomes clear Andrea's got her eyes on him.
As luck would have it, this isn't their last encounter with The Three Thugateers. But there are even crazier lunatics out in the wilderness, and darn it if Rick and Bert aren't going to find them all before their vacation's over.
Laymon gets a lot of things right with this book. It's still a fast read in Laymon's trademark style, but it doesn't carry the relentless, breakneck packing of some of his other reads. My paperback copy clocks in at 333 pages and I burned through it in about four hours (with periodic breaks due to a need for food or other interruptions). In addition, both Gillian and Rick are reasonably well-developed as main characters with interesting back-stories explaining their neuroses. We don't spend any time in Bert's head so it's harder to get a handle on her except through what Rick sees, but we do spend a little time later on getting to know Andrea and Bonnie. Too little, really, but it's nice to see it there at all.
This book was published after Laymon died, so my assumption is that it was one of the last manuscripts he was in the process of working on or had finished prior to his death. I think this shows: much like "The Travelling Vampire Show" and "Night in the Lonesome October", Laymon keeps his trademarks of horny, nubile protagonists and splatterpunk-delighting gore, but they're more restrained here. A lot of what you imagine goes beyond what's on the page, at least up until the final twenty or so pages where everything he's been building towards explodes like a grotesque, literotic discharge across the paper. Sure there's plenty of girls running around in nothing or next-to-nothing, and guys ogling the flesh on display or almost on display, but much of the sex and the violence take place 'off screen'. Laymon works this in to tease and tantalize, because he wants that final act to be an all-consuming payoff where everybody gets what they came for, whether it was graphic violence or carnal sex, and good lord is there plenty of both to go around.
The other thing Laymon gets right I'm hiding with spoiler tags. Not because revealing it would truly spoil the book, but because it's a nice surprise revelation that most people won't see coming:
The book isn't so good that it escapes the three-star rating however. The book's largest weakness, in my opinion, is that we know who the villain of the story is from the get-go, and while we learn about his likes and habits from Gillian's little tour of his home, and later her confrontation with him when he arrives back unexpectedly, we still finish the book knowing almost nothing about him, and that's disappointing. Laymon's very good at designing villains, getting us inside their heads, and helping us understand what drives them to do what they do. Books like "Quake", "Island", "Endless Night", and "Come Out Tonight" all feature well-rounded antagonists, so I know Laymon's capable of writing them, and that's what's so disappointing about Frederick Holden. He's your basic, run-of-the-mill serial killer with good looks who gets off on killing young girls and dumping their bodies out in the middle of nowhere. Reasonably intelligent, wealthy enough, obsessed with body building and kinky sex, and well-read on other serial killers...these traits are all well and good, but his excuse for why he does what he does is that other men have these desires, but he's macho enough to act on them. Umm...OK. That's all? I mean, the idea is kind of creepy, but we already know people behave like this because we live in the real world. There's no new ground broken in "No Sanctuary" with Holden's character, and one simple change could have taken everyone by surprise and fixed this: make 'Uncle Fredrick' and Jerry one and the same.
If Laymon had gone this route, I'd have dropped five stars without even thinking about it. As it is, Holden's simply a cliche of the horror genre. He's intelligent and dangerous, but not particularly memorable, and if the villain in your horror story isn't memorable then you've done something wrong.
There's also the matter of the completely pointless, but almost unintentionally hilarious, sub-plot featuring Angus, another whack-job hillbilly out in the middle of nowhere who's been doing the Lord's work in the wilderness now for fifty years. Angus winds up being more than meets the eye, and when he's first introduced, we're not even sure if Rick hallucinated him or if he's legit. His eventual encounter with Rick and Bert, however, comes as one of those moments where you're yelling at the people on the page to just keep walking, and it adds nothing to the story except aggravation that the two haven't yet turned around and gone home. I'll buy a certain level of dumb-headedness from my characters, but their second encounter with Angus is the sort of thing that could only happen in a cheesy horror film because characters were following the script. Laymon's better than that for the rest of the book, and the book would have lost nothing had this part been excised.
All told, I liked "No Sanctuary" enough to give it this long-ass review. It's not Laymon's best, but it shows that even at the end, he was still improving as a writer, still trying new tricks, and still doing what Dick did best: entertaining the hell out of his fans.
The book starts with a home invasion: pretty young Rhonda, alone in the house on Saturday night while her parents visit Aunt Betty, is abducted from her bedroom by a man who promises he won't hurt her if she just does what he says. Either she doesn't follow his instructions or he's not good at keeping promises, because three days later her body turns up a long way from home.
We jump to Rick's bedroom where he's awakened by a phone call from Bert (call her 'Bertha' and die), his girlfriend. The hour is early, but vacation waits for no one, and they've got a long drive ahead of them. Rick hates camping because he broke his leg hiking with his family when he was fourteen, but Bert's got the outdoors on the brain, and rather than see her hike the wilderness alone and unprotected, Rick's going to push down the nightmares and try to make it through with a little help from his two other friends: a fifth of bourbon and a loaded revolver. Neither of them were on Bert's packing list, but he's not leaving the city without them, and with any luck he won't need either one, but this is a Laymon story so you know the chances of that are slim to none.
Once Rick and Bert get underway, we meet Gillian O'Neill. Landlady for a twenty-unit apartment building, she receives some bad news: her office manager Odie and his wife Grace are leaving, heading back to the country to take care of Odie's invalid father and a soon-t0-arrive baby. The stress of having to find a new manager triggers Gillian's compulsion, and she goes out house-hunting...but not in the traditional sense. Gillian's hobby is finding homes where the family's gone away for a while, break in, live there for while, then skip out before they return with no one the wiser. She's got cover stories galore, she takes all the precautions, and she's only been surprised twice in all the years she's been doing it. By now she has the routine down pat for canvassing the neighborhood, picking a target, and making herself at home.
The house she selects (purely on the basis of it having a nice hot tub) belongs to one Frederick Holden, and if anyone should happen to ask, she's just house-sitting for her dear Uncle Fred while he's out of town. It doesn't hurt that Holden's neighbor, Jerry, is a good lookin' dude with a fine swimming pool...good looking enough to make her start breaking rules about not fraternizing with neighbors.
Unfortunately for Gillian, 'Uncle' Frederick has an obsessions with slasher films, horror novels, True Crime books, S&M sex, and serial killers that would make even Albert Fish or Edmund Kemper tell him to dial it down a notch...and after discovering this, Gillian realizes she has no idea when he's coming back. Naturally she packs her stuff and leaves immediately, because she realizes she's become the inadvertent final girl in a horror story, and no, sorry, just kidding, she doesn't because this is a Laymon novel and did I mention what a nice swimming pool Jerry has...?
Gillian isn't the only glutton for punishment in all this though. Rick and Bert find the camping trails and paths far from deserted, and their first encounter with Jase, Luke, and Wally, a trio of male hikers, is enough to bring the awful memories of what really happened to Rick on that earlier vacation crashing back into his brain, especially when Jase, the leader of the group, starts admiring Bert's landscape a little too closely. Instincts on edge from the encounter, the pair discuss heading a different direction from the three young men, but the arrival of Bonnie and Andrea, a pair of pretty university students from Santa Cruz taking the same trail, changes their mind. Unwilling to leave the girls to face the obnoxious guys alone, they become a party of four, driving a nice wedge of sexual tension between Rick and Bert once it becomes clear Andrea's got her eyes on him.
As luck would have it, this isn't their last encounter with The Three Thugateers. But there are even crazier lunatics out in the wilderness, and darn it if Rick and Bert aren't going to find them all before their vacation's over.
Laymon gets a lot of things right with this book. It's still a fast read in Laymon's trademark style, but it doesn't carry the relentless, breakneck packing of some of his other reads. My paperback copy clocks in at 333 pages and I burned through it in about four hours (with periodic breaks due to a need for food or other interruptions). In addition, both Gillian and Rick are reasonably well-developed as main characters with interesting back-stories explaining their neuroses. We don't spend any time in Bert's head so it's harder to get a handle on her except through what Rick sees, but we do spend a little time later on getting to know Andrea and Bonnie. Too little, really, but it's nice to see it there at all.
This book was published after Laymon died, so my assumption is that it was one of the last manuscripts he was in the process of working on or had finished prior to his death. I think this shows: much like "The Travelling Vampire Show" and "Night in the Lonesome October", Laymon keeps his trademarks of horny, nubile protagonists and splatterpunk-delighting gore, but they're more restrained here. A lot of what you imagine goes beyond what's on the page, at least up until the final twenty or so pages where everything he's been building towards explodes like a grotesque, literotic discharge across the paper. Sure there's plenty of girls running around in nothing or next-to-nothing, and guys ogling the flesh on display or almost on display, but much of the sex and the violence take place 'off screen'. Laymon works this in to tease and tantalize, because he wants that final act to be an all-consuming payoff where everybody gets what they came for, whether it was graphic violence or carnal sex, and good lord is there plenty of both to go around.
The other thing Laymon gets right I'm hiding with spoiler tags. Not because revealing it would truly spoil the book, but because it's a nice surprise revelation that most people won't see coming:
Spoiler
Jase, Luke, and Wally aren't antagonists. Sure they're assholes who behave in a manner more befitting of cavemen than modern-day humans, but the scene where Jase disarms Rick and calls Bert into the camp to discuss 'how things are going to be' leaves you suspecting a certain something because it's a Laymon book. When Jase hands the gun over to Bert and instead makes it clear that Rick's behavior and assumptions that they're a bunch of rapists is not only delusional but criminal, it's a beautiful reversal of the way events normally play out in this kind of book. These are three kids spending a few days out in the wilderness who happened across some pretty girls, watched them from a distance and enjoyed the show, but otherwise have done no wrong and don't plan on doing anything either as long as Rick and Company leave them the hell alone. It's a great head-fake, and I applaud Laymon for it. He's having fun with his audience, giving us a character in Rick who, in his inability to cope with crushing paranoia brought on by what happened the last time a group of strange males wandered into camp, conjures up a warrantless fantasy where the three are obviously stalking them with designs on murder-rapes that the readers go along with because "It's a Laymon novel, and you expect that sort of thing in a Laymon book." Way to play with expectations, Mr. Laymon, and well-done indeed.The book isn't so good that it escapes the three-star rating however. The book's largest weakness, in my opinion, is that we know who the villain of the story is from the get-go, and while we learn about his likes and habits from Gillian's little tour of his home, and later her confrontation with him when he arrives back unexpectedly, we still finish the book knowing almost nothing about him, and that's disappointing. Laymon's very good at designing villains, getting us inside their heads, and helping us understand what drives them to do what they do. Books like "Quake", "Island", "Endless Night", and "Come Out Tonight" all feature well-rounded antagonists, so I know Laymon's capable of writing them, and that's what's so disappointing about Frederick Holden. He's your basic, run-of-the-mill serial killer with good looks who gets off on killing young girls and dumping their bodies out in the middle of nowhere. Reasonably intelligent, wealthy enough, obsessed with body building and kinky sex, and well-read on other serial killers...these traits are all well and good, but his excuse for why he does what he does is that other men have these desires, but he's macho enough to act on them. Umm...OK. That's all? I mean, the idea is kind of creepy, but we already know people behave like this because we live in the real world. There's no new ground broken in "No Sanctuary" with Holden's character, and one simple change could have taken everyone by surprise and fixed this: make 'Uncle Fredrick' and Jerry one and the same.
If Laymon had gone this route, I'd have dropped five stars without even thinking about it. As it is, Holden's simply a cliche of the horror genre. He's intelligent and dangerous, but not particularly memorable, and if the villain in your horror story isn't memorable then you've done something wrong.
There's also the matter of the completely pointless, but almost unintentionally hilarious, sub-plot featuring Angus, another whack-job hillbilly out in the middle of nowhere who's been doing the Lord's work in the wilderness now for fifty years. Angus winds up being more than meets the eye, and when he's first introduced, we're not even sure if Rick hallucinated him or if he's legit. His eventual encounter with Rick and Bert, however, comes as one of those moments where you're yelling at the people on the page to just keep walking, and it adds nothing to the story except aggravation that the two haven't yet turned around and gone home. I'll buy a certain level of dumb-headedness from my characters, but their second encounter with Angus is the sort of thing that could only happen in a cheesy horror film because characters were following the script. Laymon's better than that for the rest of the book, and the book would have lost nothing had this part been excised.
All told, I liked "No Sanctuary" enough to give it this long-ass review. It's not Laymon's best, but it shows that even at the end, he was still improving as a writer, still trying new tricks, and still doing what Dick did best: entertaining the hell out of his fans.
Laymon's work never lets me down! Suspend belief, sit back, and get ready for one hell of a wild ride! No Sanctuary is a typical Laymon novel, which is a good thing. Two subplots, both full of wild and crazy twists, converge in a nightmarish conclusion! I was on edge throughout the book, couldn't wait to find out just how he would wrap things up. Another of his novels that will remain a favorite of mine!
I started off very excited to read this book as I enjoy the author. The beginning had me hooked but I got a little lost to the middle, as I went past that I wanted to know how it ends. Personally I feel the ending was rushed but I still enjoyed it.
Ein klassischer Laymon und auch wieder nicht. Er ist ruhiger als erwartet und dennoch genauso böse!
Ein klassischer Laymon und auch wieder nicht. Er ist ruhiger als erwartet und dennoch genauso böse!