Richard Laymon is one of my guilty pleasures. His novels are for the most part ridiculous and are always filled with lots of sex and gore, but I can't help turning the pages when I get into one of his gore-fests! This one was typical Laymon, but was a little more ambitious in some ways. In this one, Laymon structures his novel with multiple storylines that all come together at the end. The stories are really varied but they all seem to suck you in. First there is a museum curator and her boyfriend who happens to be a cop dealing with apparent burglaries at the museum; then there is the focal point of the story, a mindless mummy named Amara who is wrecking havoc across nearby neighborhoods looking for infants and tearing out throats; there's a story filled with sex about a teenage boy who is kidnapped and finds himself in a cage where he and other captives must perform various sex acts or end up with their throats slit; then there's a rich blind girl who is wishing for love and hangs out on the roof of her dead father's mansion; and there's three teenage runaways from North Carolina who are running from an abusive stepfather and who must deal with a range of predators in California. In the middle of the novel, Laymon tells the story of how Amara was discovered in Egypt in the 1920s and why she walks after death. And of course, Laymon throws in some kinky sex with a pair of deaf-mute twins as part of the 1920s narrative. Like I say, typical Laymon! Laymon passed away a few years ago and there are still quite a few of his books that I haven't read so I'm sure I'll be reading more.

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