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A review by modernzorker
To Wake the Dead by Richard Laymon
2.0
She has lain, untouched, for centuries, confined to a tomb where the walls have been painted with pigs' blood, her name excised from the hieroglyphs. She is Amara: wife to Mentuhotep the First, consort to an underworld god, now little more than a desiccated corpse bereft of wrappings, her name lost to history, her body consigned to collect dust in the Callahan Collection of the Charles Ward museum.
The man who has imparted her to the museum has but one demand: the golden seals which hold closed her sarcophagus must never be broken. Amara's body must not be disturbed. To do so is to invite disaster. To do so would be to wake the dead.
Or so the story goes.
Naturally the idea of a mummy waking up and walking around is absurd. But then the seals are broken. The night watchman and two other security guards are killed. Amara's body keeps showing up in places other than her coffin when morning rolls around. If she isn't the one doing the killings, then who is responsible? On the other hand, if she is, how on Earth can curator Susan Connors possibly stop something that has been undead for over four thousand years?
* * * * *
Richard Laymon may have died in early 2001, but the man was a hard-working writer who always had several manuscripts going at the same time. Thus, despite his February passing, he left behind enough work that his wife and daughter were able to piece together to provide several posthumous publications. To Wake the Dead (also known as Amara in the UK) was one of these.
By 1999/2000, we saw a shift in Laymon's style. His early and middle works were thoroughly grounded in the pulp shock of the 'Splatterpunk' movement, where the sex and violence were raw and uninhibited. Then came titles like Among the Missing, The Traveling Vampire Show, and Night in the Lonesome October, which all felt like Laymon upping his game, writing to a bit of a higher caliber, and enjoying it. Characters became more well-rounded, the sex and violence became less prurient, and the tone shifted -- Laymon became seemingly less interested in exploring monsters, and more interested in exploring characters.
I loved it.
That's not to say everything written pre-1999 was a blood- and semen-drenched, cardboard-cutout-filled schlockfest, but these later works felt like they were, dare I say it, aspiring to something greater. Compare early works like The Woods Are Dark and Allhallow's Eve to After Midnight and Come Out Tonight, and it's impossible not to feel the difference. Was Laymon...mellowing with age?
Well, if To Wake the Dead is any indication, the answer is, "Not on your life."
[Edit: In my research into Laymon and his work, I've discovered that To Wake the Dead was actually one of Laymon's "trunk" novels: one he wrote early in his career and shopped around to various publishers, none of whom were interested. It was published after his death thanks to a renewed interest in Laymon and his works, but the story itself was written all the way back in the 1980s, which explains the massive shift in style from the stories he completed prior to his demise.]
I'll say this much: To Wake the Dead might be the most ambitious novel Laymon ever attempted. Not in terms of the story -- writing a book where a long-dead mummy comes back to life and starts killing people, especially a couple of years after 1999's The Mummy with Brendan Fraser updated the concept, doesn't take any special talent -- but rather in terms of the sheer number of characters involved in the book. Throughout the story, we are subjected to an entire smorgasbord of main characters, some of which seem to have little if anything to do with the main story at hand. Because of this, To Wake the Dead feels disjointed and out-of-kilter, like a real corpse struggling to rise and walk around after a few thousand years of slumber.
To wit, we have:
- Susan Connors, curator at the Charles Ward Museum and our main protagonist, who has been put in charge of cataloging the new additions to the Callahan Collection, including the mummy Amara.
- Tag Parker, a police officer and Susan's boyfriend, trying to keep Susan safe from a nutcase named Mabel who has decided that she should be Tag's girlfriend and is jealous of Susan.
- Robert Callahan himself, whose memoirs of traveling through Egypt with his father and discovering Amara form a sort of book-within-a-book smack-dab in the center of the story.
- Imad, the live-in helper/bodyguard to the now-deceased Callahan, who is the only one with the information necessary to understand what Amara is and why waking her up is a terrible idea.
- Ed Lake, a high school kid who gets dumped by his date out in the middle of nowhere and then kidnapped, who wakes up in a cage with two other victims and is forced to perform increasingly degrading and humiliating acts for his unknown captors on penalty of torture and/or death.
- April Vallsarra, a young blind woman who lives alone in a beautiful mansion and dreams of one day finding a companion to take away her loneliness.
- Cody, a teenage runaway who has taken his girlfriend Grace and her younger sister Pix away from an abusive home life and headed for California, where Grace dreams of becoming an actress.
- Byron, an elementary school kid who stumbles across Amara's body while out playing and decides to take it home for himself, so he can show it off to the neighborhood kids and make a bit of money.
Laymon's no stranger to stories with multiple point-of-view characters, but there's a reason why most writers generally limit themselves to one or two main ones, and it's because juggling so many disparate plot lines leaves less room for each one to develop. And those eight are just the main focus: there are many other minor characters who get POV chapter of their own, like the robbers who break into Callahan's home and steal Amara; the luckless night watchman Barney who is among Amara's first victims; and the subsequent two security guards hired by the museum who also die violently at her hands.
In the end, of course, Laymon ties everything together, but To Wake the Dead still feels like a ten-course meal where few of the dishes compliment one another, and each new plate diminishes the effect of the whole. It wouldn't surprise me to learn it was published with little editorial oversight. Despite being only a bit under 400 pages, there's quite a bit of bloat which could have been excised to make way for deeper characterization. The plot with Cody, Grace, and Pix especially stands out here, since they aren't introduced until more than 1/3rd of the way into the book, and their presence and actions don't really contribute anything to the main story until the last few pages. Likewise, several of Imad's chapters exist only to show him seducing and sleeping with different women -- this isn't out of place in a Laymon novel, but they could be cut without losing one bit of the plot, thus tightening up the story that much more and allowing more room for expanded main characters when they aren't having sex.
Speaking of the sex...hooo boy. I'm no prude, and Laymon's never been one to shy away from characters knocking boots, but holy cow does To Wake the Dead push it up to eleven where the sex is concerned. From an incestuous pair of deaf-mute twin girls who seduce one character, to the various situations encountered by Ed and the others imprisoned with him, to your standard vanilla 'the babysitter is getting it on with her boyfriend while the kids are asleep' boffing, to Mabel's increasingly grotesque descriptions of not only what people do to her but what she wants to do to Tag, to Imad's exploits, it's almost harder to find a random page where someone is not getting laid. To Laymon's credit, even he was wise enough to 'turn the camera away' when a guy pulls a gun on an underage girl and demands a blowjob, but there's enough sexual hyperbole that even de Sade would have told him to put a cork in it and calm down.
I might not have been so hard on this angle, except that the ending couldn't have been more rushed if Laymon had tossed it in an envelope for "Next Day Delivery". Laymon takes one chapter to wrap up every one of the plot threads described above, including dispatching the main antagonist, and that's just not enough time. Given another chapter or two to do the wrap in a less-sloppy way besides killing half the cast, this could have been at least satisfactory. As it is, it just feels like he hit 386 pages and was like, "Well, at least I've got the story finished, I'll revise and tighten it later." To be fair, that might be exactly what happened -- as a posthumous publication, there's no telling how much of any work was done, either by Laymon's family or Leisure themselves, to get it into shape for publication. That it reads like a partially-revised first draft, especially when compared to the rest of Laymon's pre-death output, may be because that's just what it is, and if so, I shouldn't complain too much because at least we got to read it, right? I would go along with that...if it wasn't for one critical disappointment.
One of the reasons I dig Laymon's stories is that even when they take a turn into the supernatural, such as with his vampire books like The Stake and The Traveling Vampire Show, his take on those hoary tropes is always unique. They aren't "vampire stories", they are "stories which might or might not contain vampires", often left until very late in the book, even the final chapter, to let the reader in on the gag. But To Wake the Dead promises a mummy up front, and delivers just that within the first few pages. What's more, there's really nothing to differentiate this mummy from other mummies of either print or screen fiction. Amara is like every other mummy you've ever seen or read about: she's basically indestructible, she kills without remorse, and she wants one particular thing to the exclusion of all else. To Wake the Dead is disappointing because Laymon plays straight to the reader's preconceived notions, when it's clear he is capable of so much better.
Ordinarily I'm a generous sort, and because there's nothing technically 'wrong' with To Wake the Dead, I'd give it a three out of five: competent, if average. But there's no mystique to Amara -- this is a book about a mummy through and through, where you know she'll be defeated in the end. When that end comes, it comes entirely too soon and entirely too quickly, with one character who goes entirely against everything she's been built up to be over the course of the last few hundred pages. That's disappointing.
I still finished it, and almost everything I finish gets at least a 2/5, because if I finished it there's a good chance I didn't hate it. I was rather indifferent about it, and perhaps that's worse than being angry. I completed To Wake the Dead, but feel nothing for having done so.
More's the pity.
The man who has imparted her to the museum has but one demand: the golden seals which hold closed her sarcophagus must never be broken. Amara's body must not be disturbed. To do so is to invite disaster. To do so would be to wake the dead.
Or so the story goes.
Naturally the idea of a mummy waking up and walking around is absurd. But then the seals are broken. The night watchman and two other security guards are killed. Amara's body keeps showing up in places other than her coffin when morning rolls around. If she isn't the one doing the killings, then who is responsible? On the other hand, if she is, how on Earth can curator Susan Connors possibly stop something that has been undead for over four thousand years?
* * * * *
Richard Laymon may have died in early 2001, but the man was a hard-working writer who always had several manuscripts going at the same time. Thus, despite his February passing, he left behind enough work that his wife and daughter were able to piece together to provide several posthumous publications. To Wake the Dead (also known as Amara in the UK) was one of these.
By 1999/2000, we saw a shift in Laymon's style. His early and middle works were thoroughly grounded in the pulp shock of the 'Splatterpunk' movement, where the sex and violence were raw and uninhibited. Then came titles like Among the Missing, The Traveling Vampire Show, and Night in the Lonesome October, which all felt like Laymon upping his game, writing to a bit of a higher caliber, and enjoying it. Characters became more well-rounded, the sex and violence became less prurient, and the tone shifted -- Laymon became seemingly less interested in exploring monsters, and more interested in exploring characters.
I loved it.
That's not to say everything written pre-1999 was a blood- and semen-drenched, cardboard-cutout-filled schlockfest, but these later works felt like they were, dare I say it, aspiring to something greater. Compare early works like The Woods Are Dark and Allhallow's Eve to After Midnight and Come Out Tonight, and it's impossible not to feel the difference. Was Laymon...mellowing with age?
Well, if To Wake the Dead is any indication, the answer is, "Not on your life."
[Edit: In my research into Laymon and his work, I've discovered that To Wake the Dead was actually one of Laymon's "trunk" novels: one he wrote early in his career and shopped around to various publishers, none of whom were interested. It was published after his death thanks to a renewed interest in Laymon and his works, but the story itself was written all the way back in the 1980s, which explains the massive shift in style from the stories he completed prior to his demise.]
I'll say this much: To Wake the Dead might be the most ambitious novel Laymon ever attempted. Not in terms of the story -- writing a book where a long-dead mummy comes back to life and starts killing people, especially a couple of years after 1999's The Mummy with Brendan Fraser updated the concept, doesn't take any special talent -- but rather in terms of the sheer number of characters involved in the book. Throughout the story, we are subjected to an entire smorgasbord of main characters, some of which seem to have little if anything to do with the main story at hand. Because of this, To Wake the Dead feels disjointed and out-of-kilter, like a real corpse struggling to rise and walk around after a few thousand years of slumber.
To wit, we have:
- Susan Connors, curator at the Charles Ward Museum and our main protagonist, who has been put in charge of cataloging the new additions to the Callahan Collection, including the mummy Amara.
- Tag Parker, a police officer and Susan's boyfriend, trying to keep Susan safe from a nutcase named Mabel who has decided that she should be Tag's girlfriend and is jealous of Susan.
- Robert Callahan himself, whose memoirs of traveling through Egypt with his father and discovering Amara form a sort of book-within-a-book smack-dab in the center of the story.
- Imad, the live-in helper/bodyguard to the now-deceased Callahan, who is the only one with the information necessary to understand what Amara is and why waking her up is a terrible idea.
- Ed Lake, a high school kid who gets dumped by his date out in the middle of nowhere and then kidnapped, who wakes up in a cage with two other victims and is forced to perform increasingly degrading and humiliating acts for his unknown captors on penalty of torture and/or death.
- April Vallsarra, a young blind woman who lives alone in a beautiful mansion and dreams of one day finding a companion to take away her loneliness.
- Cody, a teenage runaway who has taken his girlfriend Grace and her younger sister Pix away from an abusive home life and headed for California, where Grace dreams of becoming an actress.
- Byron, an elementary school kid who stumbles across Amara's body while out playing and decides to take it home for himself, so he can show it off to the neighborhood kids and make a bit of money.
Laymon's no stranger to stories with multiple point-of-view characters, but there's a reason why most writers generally limit themselves to one or two main ones, and it's because juggling so many disparate plot lines leaves less room for each one to develop. And those eight are just the main focus: there are many other minor characters who get POV chapter of their own, like the robbers who break into Callahan's home and steal Amara; the luckless night watchman Barney who is among Amara's first victims; and the subsequent two security guards hired by the museum who also die violently at her hands.
In the end, of course, Laymon ties everything together, but To Wake the Dead still feels like a ten-course meal where few of the dishes compliment one another, and each new plate diminishes the effect of the whole. It wouldn't surprise me to learn it was published with little editorial oversight. Despite being only a bit under 400 pages, there's quite a bit of bloat which could have been excised to make way for deeper characterization. The plot with Cody, Grace, and Pix especially stands out here, since they aren't introduced until more than 1/3rd of the way into the book, and their presence and actions don't really contribute anything to the main story until the last few pages. Likewise, several of Imad's chapters exist only to show him seducing and sleeping with different women -- this isn't out of place in a Laymon novel, but they could be cut without losing one bit of the plot, thus tightening up the story that much more and allowing more room for expanded main characters when they aren't having sex.
Speaking of the sex...hooo boy. I'm no prude, and Laymon's never been one to shy away from characters knocking boots, but holy cow does To Wake the Dead push it up to eleven where the sex is concerned. From an incestuous pair of deaf-mute twin girls who seduce one character, to the various situations encountered by Ed and the others imprisoned with him, to your standard vanilla 'the babysitter is getting it on with her boyfriend while the kids are asleep' boffing, to Mabel's increasingly grotesque descriptions of not only what people do to her but what she wants to do to Tag, to Imad's exploits, it's almost harder to find a random page where someone is not getting laid. To Laymon's credit, even he was wise enough to 'turn the camera away' when a guy pulls a gun on an underage girl and demands a blowjob, but there's enough sexual hyperbole that even de Sade would have told him to put a cork in it and calm down.
I might not have been so hard on this angle, except that the ending couldn't have been more rushed if Laymon had tossed it in an envelope for "Next Day Delivery". Laymon takes one chapter to wrap up every one of the plot threads described above, including dispatching the main antagonist, and that's just not enough time. Given another chapter or two to do the wrap in a less-sloppy way besides killing half the cast, this could have been at least satisfactory. As it is, it just feels like he hit 386 pages and was like, "Well, at least I've got the story finished, I'll revise and tighten it later." To be fair, that might be exactly what happened -- as a posthumous publication, there's no telling how much of any work was done, either by Laymon's family or Leisure themselves, to get it into shape for publication. That it reads like a partially-revised first draft, especially when compared to the rest of Laymon's pre-death output, may be because that's just what it is, and if so, I shouldn't complain too much because at least we got to read it, right? I would go along with that...if it wasn't for one critical disappointment.
One of the reasons I dig Laymon's stories is that even when they take a turn into the supernatural, such as with his vampire books like The Stake and The Traveling Vampire Show, his take on those hoary tropes is always unique. They aren't "vampire stories", they are "stories which might or might not contain vampires", often left until very late in the book, even the final chapter, to let the reader in on the gag. But To Wake the Dead promises a mummy up front, and delivers just that within the first few pages. What's more, there's really nothing to differentiate this mummy from other mummies of either print or screen fiction. Amara is like every other mummy you've ever seen or read about: she's basically indestructible, she kills without remorse, and she wants one particular thing to the exclusion of all else. To Wake the Dead is disappointing because Laymon plays straight to the reader's preconceived notions, when it's clear he is capable of so much better.
Ordinarily I'm a generous sort, and because there's nothing technically 'wrong' with To Wake the Dead, I'd give it a three out of five: competent, if average. But there's no mystique to Amara -- this is a book about a mummy through and through, where you know she'll be defeated in the end. When that end comes, it comes entirely too soon and entirely too quickly, with one character who goes entirely against everything she's been built up to be over the course of the last few hundred pages. That's disappointing.
I still finished it, and almost everything I finish gets at least a 2/5, because if I finished it there's a good chance I didn't hate it. I was rather indifferent about it, and perhaps that's worse than being angry. I completed To Wake the Dead, but feel nothing for having done so.
More's the pity.