It’s not really believable that anyone would be so stupid, but he’s the bad guy in a trashy horror novel, so I’ll let that slide. The dad gets out of prison and immediately tries to get home to rape his kid again. When I finished my first Laymon book I noted the exact same thing. Ok, the plot is dumb, but that’s not important. You can guess how this ends – the whole gang goes into the Beast House and things turn out horribly for all of them. There, the woman falls in love with a man who is trying to kill the monster. They run until they end up in a small town that contains a house that has a murderous monster living in it. This is the story of a woman and her child running away from their abusive husband/father. Maybe that makes me a wuss, but I’d prefer to be a wuss than a person that likes reading books about kids getting molested. I know that horror is supposed to be shocking and all that, but I never want to read about children getting raped. This book is horrible because it’s paedophiley. Yeah, it’s a splatterpunk novel, and it has lots of blood in it, but that’s not why I’m yucking it. I knew it was going to be crap, but I had to read The Cellar to see what all the fuss was about. Things were getting curiouser and curiouser.

I then saw another negative review of this book on Mica’s blog. A few months later, I read Stephen King’s Danse Macabre, a history of horror in which the author describes the same book as unsuccessful. I put this book on my to-read list immediately. Then I read a post on Too Much Horror Fiction that mentioned a Laymon book featuring “a mutation where the tip of the urethra can extend as a kind of “mouth,” with its own tongue”. There’s a lot of authors and books out there though, and I wasn’t sure which of Laymon’s books to check out next, so I forgot about him for a while. When I read Richard Laymon’s Flesh a few years ago, I was pleasantly surprised. Feature Books – 1990 (Originally published 1980)

The cellar by richard laymon