Horror Review: Allhallow's Eve by Richard Laymon (1994, Headline)

Did you hear? There's a party at the old Sherwood place. You know, the house down at the end of Oakhurst Road.

What do you mean, "When's the party?" Halloween night! When did you think they'd plan something like that, butt smear? No idea who's throwing it though. The invitation doesn't say. Just 9pm, October 31st and all the standard crap about games and refreshments and come in costume, bring a friend, yadda yadda yadda.

Guess ol' Morley decided to do something with it since there's no way in hell anybody'd buy that house. 'Investment opportunity' my ass. One whisper about the murders that took place there and any sane buyer would bolt. Wonder how much of it he had to fix up? Fifteen years is a long time for a house to sit vacant like that.

Of course I'm going. Why wouldn't I? Got the invitation didn't I? Surprised you didn't, but it says to bring a guest, so you could go with me if you're not heading over to Aleshia Barnes' place for her party instead.

Anyway, I'm gonna go tell the rest of the team. Maybe after Mrs. Barnes throws us out, we can crash that one. I bet it'll be killer, just you wait and see. Catch you later, man.

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The publication date on my Headline UK paperback of Allhallow's Eve reads 1994, but this story makes a lot more sense to me knowing its original copyright was 1985; the Laymon writing this book isn't the same fun-loving, happy-go-lucky guy who penned some of my favorites like Quake and Night In the Lonesome October.

Oh no.

The Richard Laymon who penned this story was angry enough to frighten the Hulk and bitter enough to sweat vermouth. And I totally get it. After all, it was just a few years' prior that his second horror novel, The Woods Are Dark, was snipped to pieces and re-written without his consent by a publisher with no interest in seeing it strike gold. This is a post-fucked-over-by-Warner Laymon, and does it ever show.

Exhibit A is the characters. This is one of the very few books Laymon wrote where the protagonists are all downright unsympathetic. Normally, Laymon's main characters are simple run-of-the-mill ordinary folk who try to do the right thing and get brutally worked over by circumstance. Allhallow's Eve, however, delivers up a smorgasbord of characters both major and minor who barely deserve to live, and rest assured, virtually everybody even remotely on the 'good' side of the column will be hacked to stock cubes by the story's end. Even Sam, the closest this book comes to a good guy protagonist, the deputy investigating not only the death of the sheriff, but also the disappearances of a few other people around the community, proves to be something of a dick, especially when the epilogue is taken into consideration.

Besides Sam, we have Eric. Eric's the high school-aged son of Cynthia, the woman Sam's been seeing (and sleeping with) for a few months before the book opens. Initially portrayed as your standard loser outcast, roughed up by bullies, ignored by girls, and looked down on by much of the faculty and staff of the school as a delinquent due to behavioral issues stemming from his father's abandonment of him before he was even born, Eric's the sort of kid we should be sympathizing with...but it doesn't take long for Laymon to give us a glimpse into Eric's psyche that firmly cements him as a complete asshole who enjoys ogling his mom in her nightgown and committing minor acts of vandalism.

The final viewpoint character we get is Bill. He's another high school student, but he's best friends with Nate, the local juvenile delinquent, who enjoys nothing more than bullying Eric and taking his money. Bill isn't exactly a bad kid, and he genuinely feels remorseful about some of the antics he pulls, but it's hard to get too attached to anyone who's best friends with a douchebag the size of Nate. We all remember kids like this from high school, and there's no shame in rooting against them when the chips are down. That they both get the shit kicked out of them and humiliated in front of their classmates towards the end of the story is no skin off anybody's nose.

That's just the main characters though--virtually all of the side characters are just as bad, or at least as vacuous, and this small town is rife with just so much misconduct, you guys! I honestly lost track of who all was sleeping and/or swinging with whom by the end of the book. The vice-principal is a power-tripping sociopath who makes a kid do push-ups on urine-soaked restroom floors, quizzes a girl in a grotesquely inappropriate manner about an assault she endured , and straight-up cock-punches a student with zero repercussions. Finally, we have the stock 80's horror trope of the inappropriately creepy gay pedophile flasher showing up just to make sure you well and truly never want to come back to this community once the visit's concluded.

It's also barely appropriate to call this one a horror book. Compared to the terrors unleashed by Laymon's imagination in previous books, revolving around cannibal cults in a forest or bizarre bestial creatures hiding in the basement, this one's almost pedestrian. You could almost classify it as a mystery, since much of the book revolves around the questions of who's behind the party at Sherwood house, and who's going around killing people prior to the festivities, but halfway through the book Laymon provides the answers. At that point the story turns into a straight-up thriller promising one carnage-filled blood orgy of a climax. Also, despite the carnage on display, Laymon's surprisingly light on details, choosing to tell rather than show most of the gore. The death of one major supporting character even happens entirely off-screen, with the reader unaware until literally the book's last page. I get the feeling this reaction was prompted by Warner's overreaction to all the blood'n'guts on display in The Cellar and Laymon's original draft of The Woods Are Dark, as Laymon in later novels has no qualms leering over the fleshy morsels. Even boobs, one of Laymon's most favorite things in the world to write about, are barely touched upon when bared. The final scene in the Sherwood house features several disrobings, and each rates a quick single sentence to let the reader know it happened and that someone saw them. I'm not complaining about the lack of these things, mind you--it's kind of interesting to see a more mature side of Laymon, if only slightly--but I do a disservice as a reviewer if I fail to point out a dearth of something a writer is otherwise infamous for including in the text.

Allhallow's Eve isn't a bad book, but it isn't a particularly great one either. I get the feeling from reading it, however, that it was a very necessary book for Laymon to write. The prose just has that 'whipped dog' feel to it, where the scars of his treatment at Warner are still tender to the probing. It's very much to Laymon's credit as a writer that he managed to rise above the abuse he suffered at their hands and continue his writing career for almost another two decades. It doesn't take long for him to get back into the swing of things, as 1986's The Beast House proves, but Allhallow's Eve is a fascinating point of interest along Laymon Boulevard for this reason alone. It's one of the least Laymon-esque Laymon novels you'll ever find.

Three blood-slicked butcher knives out of five.

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Best Scene:

Two pop readily to mind.

First, Sam's interview with Thelma concerning her whereabouts on the night of the sheriff's murder is fucking hysterical. The woman's clearly getting off on telling him all the sordid details of her sexual escapades with different lovers, leading to this screamer right here:

"We hoist a few, then take off in his Volvo, spread a blanket on the eight hole of the golf course and go humpy-humpy. Okay? The automatic sprinklers go on, and we get drenched. Never fuck on a golf course.

Thanks, Thelma, I'll file that one away for future reference. :D

The other is a simple bit of Sam's background. Turns out he used to date a girl named Donna back in high school, up until she left him for someone else. He reflects on this:

The memory soured as he remembered Donna dumping him for Roy. He'd warned her that Roy was a sadistic sicko, but she'd laughed it off. Claimed it was sour grapes.

Well, he hoped Donna never had to find out the hard way.

Of course, anybody who's read The Cellar knows that Donna found out in just about the hardest way imaginable. I didn't notice this the first time I read the book, but I love when authors create their own little connections between their novels like this as Easter eggs for avid readers to discover.