Horror Review: No Sanctuary by Richard Laymon (2003, Leisure)

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 1995's Quake where his semi-omniscient narrator swaps between three 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 a family seeking reunification after disaster: father at work, daughter at school, and mom trapped under some debris at home.

No Sanctuary's knotted connection is a mystery up until the climax, and Laymon includes enough red herrings, head-fakes, and weirdos between the covers you'll 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, sleeping in the buff, is abducted from her bedroom by a man who swears he won't hurt her if she just does what he says. Either she doesn't follow instructions or he's a shitty promise keeper, because three days later her body turns up "a long way from home." Remember, kids: you're always safer with Aunt Betty. Don't be a Rhonda.

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 after he picks her up. 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 two buddies: a fifth of bourbon and a loaded revolver. Neither were on Bert's packing list, but he's not leaving the city without them. With any luck he won't need either, but this is a Laymon story so you can rest assured he'll be glad for at least one before the last chapter.

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-to-arrive baby. The stress of finding a new manager triggers Gillian's compulsion, and she goes house-hunting. Not, as it turns out, in the traditional sense. Gillian's hobby is finding homes where the family's gone away for a while, breaking in, living there for a day or two, then skipping out before they return with no one the wiser. She's got cover stories galore, she takes every precaution, 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 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 Freddie while he's out of town. It doesn't hurt that Holden's next-door 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.

Exploring her new digs, Gillian discovers '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. Sure, there's no proof he's actually acting on these fantasies, but better safe than sorry, especially if she doesn't know when Holden's getting home. Naturally she packs her stuff and leaves immediately, because she realizes she's become the final girl in a horror story, and--

Just kidding! This is Laymon; she's not terribly bright, and did I mention what a nice swimming pool Jerry has...?

Gillian isn't the only glutton for punishment though. Rick and Bert find the trails 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 at age fourteen crashing back, especially when Jase starts admiring Bert's landscape a little too closely. Instincts on edge, the pair discuss heading a different direction from the three young men. 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 goon squad alone, they become a party of four, driving a nice wedge of sexual tension between Rick and Bert once it becomes clear Andrea thinks Rick's pretty hot-to-trot.

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 this vacation's over.

Laymon gets a lot of things right with No Sanctuary. It's a fast read in Laymon's trademark style, but it doesn't carry the relentless, breakneck pacing of some of his other reads. My paperback clocks in at 333 pages and I burned through it in about four hours (with periodic breaks 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 her interactions with the other characters, but we do spend a little time later on getting to know what Andrea and Bonnie are all about. Too little, really, but it's nice to see any minor character development in a horror book at all. I'll take what I can get.

This book was published after Laymon's death, and my assumption is it was one of the last manuscripts he was in the process of working on or had finished. 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, 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, but much of the sex and 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 is a kind of a spoiler. Knowing it before-hand doesn't wreck the story, but it's a nice surprise revelation that most people won't see coming, so:

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS!

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 Laymon's fiction. 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 lampshade of traditional horror tropes, 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 warrant-less fantasy where the three are obviously stalking them with designs on murder-rape. The reader goes along with it because "It's a Laymon novel, and you expect that sort of thing." Way to play with expectations, Mr. Laymon--you done fooled me, and I applaud.

HERE ENDS YE SPOILERS!

The book isn't so good it escapes a three-star rating however. The book's largest weakness, in my opinion, is that we know who the primary villain of the story is from the get-go, and while we learn about his likes and habits from Gillian's tour of his home and later confrontation when he returns, we still finish the book knowing almost nothing about him. That's disappointing. Laymon's 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 regrettable 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 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, making Holden an even more cunning predator hiding in plain sight using one house for his nefarious activities and the other to cultivate a sort of 'normal guy next door' charm to throw off suspicion, I'd have dropped five stars without thinking twice. As it is, Holden's simply a cliche of the horror genre. He's dangerous but not particularly memorable, and if the villain in your horror story isn't memorable then you've missed an opportunity.

There's also the matter of the completely pointless, 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. 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 in horror stories, but their second encounter with Angus is the sort of thing that could only happen because characters were following the script instead of their common sense. Laymon's better than that, and the book would have lost nothing had Angus been excised.

All told, I liked No Sanctuary enough to give it this long-ass review. It's not Laymon's best, not even close, but it shows even at the end, he was still improving as a writer, trying new tricks, and doing what Dick did best: entertaining the hell out of his fans. It's been sixteen years since his death, and damn it, we still want him back.