Saturday, July 10, 2010

The Cellar - Richard Laymon

It takes a book like this one to make you appreciate those really good reads out there. I have many books by Richard Laymon with a ‘blurb’ stating from the acclaimed author of The Cellar or from the award winning author of The Cellar. I had built up this novel to be something of a horror classic. It’s a classic alright but not in that sense. Apart from the dreadful storyline, the actual writing was appalling, and his sentence structure childish and boring. I’m over his juvenile approach to his sexual themes, and really (in my opinion) they don’t belong in this genre.


Part of the storyline involved the discovery of a diary from the early part of the century. The ten or so pages which involved the reading of this diary was The Cellar’s only redeeming feature, it was well written and genuinely creepy.

None of the characters came to any good in the end, which is just a well as they were very one dimensional, and not very likeable and considering Laymon had a daughter at the time of writing (he died 2001) the content of this novel is pretty questionable.

The Cellar spawned two more books to form a trilogy which I will probably read as I have already bought them and can only hope they will be better than this one.

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