The Travelling Vampire Show
An unforgettable, spine-chilling horror novel
-
-
3.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- 1,99 €
-
- 1,99 €
Publisher Description
One eventful night will change the lives of three friends forever...
The Travelling Vampire Show is one of Richard Laymon's best-loved masterpieces - an evocative, nostalgic trip back to a time when innocence comes face to face with life's darker forces. Perfect for fans of Stephen King and Dean Koontz.
'This gloriously inventive piece is probably Laymon's best book yet... The prose here is rich and inventive, the atmosphere and scene-setting handled with real aplomb' - News International
It's a hot August morning in 1963. All over the rural town of Grandville, tacked to power poles and trees, taped to store windows, flyers have appeared announcing the one-night-only performance of The Travelling Vampire Show. The promised highlight of the show is the gorgeous Valeria, the only living vampire in captivity.
For three local teenagers, two boys and a girl, this is a show they can't miss. Even though the flyers say no one under eighteen will be admitted, they're determined to find a way. What follows is a story of friendship and courage, temptation and terror, when three friends go where they shouldn't go, and find much more than they ever expected.
What readers are saying about The Travelling Vampire Show:
'The final scenes are filled with excitement and were enough to keep me awake until I'd finished the story - I don't think I could have put it down until I'd found out what happened and what was going on!'
'Just when you think that you have the storyline figured out, it twists and hurtles into a surprise ending'
'Expertly written, great dialogue, keeps you engrossed to the end'
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Like the vampire he celebrates so often (Stake, etc.), this talented writer's career, once dead in the States though not overseas, has risen anew--thanks largely to Cemetery Dance, which has issued his work (Cuts; Come Out Tonight; etc.) even as no mainstream American hardcover publisher would touch it. The author's fall after his successful run in the 1980s was due to several factors, including his writerly predilection toward excess sex and violence. Here, Laymon takes those elements in hand, not so much abjuring them as putting them to artful use as he tells a wickedly involving story of three 16-year-olds and their life-changing encounter with the road show of the title. It's hot August 1963 when narrator Dwight, along with his pals--overweight Rusty and pretty (female) Slim--note flyers for the Traveling Vampire Show, featuring a purported real vampire, Valeria. Intrigued, the trio sneak onto the backwoods site of the show and there tangle with a vicious dog; after the others leave, Slim watches the spooky show troupe spear the mongrel to death. This, plus a long buildup to the show (spinning on whether troupe members are after the teens) forms most of the long narrative. Unusual for Laymon, the emphasis is on atmosphere rather than action, and he sustains a note of anticipatory dread throughout, made particularly resonant through his expert handling of the social, particularly sexual, tensions among the three teens. The novel's climax is the show itself, and here Laymon lets out the stops in typically ferocious fashion. In its understanding of the sufferings and ecstasies of youth, the novel carries some of the wisdom of King's The Body or Robert R. McCammon's Boy's Life, but the book, Laymon's best in years, belongs wholly to this too-neglected author, who with his trademark squeaky-clean yet sensual prose, high narrative drive and pitch-dark sense of humor has crafted a horror tale that's not only emotionally true but also scary and, above all, fun.
