The Stake - Richard Laymon

The Stake single-handedly changed my mind about Vampire novels. I've always liked horror stories, but never been a fan of those gothic, historical vampire books. Well The Stake very definitely contains a vampire, but any similarity ends there. It's set in the present day, and is about a group of friends who come across a coffin in an old house, containing a woman with a stake through her heart... It's a highly entertaining read, and Laymon is very clever in the way that he's taken the most obvious horror cliche (the vampire) and managed to write a novel which then totally avoids all those cliches, and is instead original and fresh. If you don't think ...  Read the complete review

The Stake is a well written and very original vampire story. Set in modern times, four friends discover a coffin containing a woman with a stake through her heart. One of the group is a writer and decides to write a story based around the coffin. Convincing himself it is for research purposes, he takes the coffin and its occupant home, with the intention of pulling the stake at the right part in his book. I enjoyed this book until the part where the vampire comes alive as a beautiful, young sexy female, who although a vampire, never kills people, just takes a little of their blood without harming them, which needless to say is a very erotic experience. Yet ...  Read the complete review

Not really a fan of vampire novels but as this was a Laymon novel i thought i would give it a go and i was not disappointed. Its not your standard Laymon novel but it did keep me enthralled throughout. Basically this is a novel about vampires and friendship with several twists and turns to keep you interested. Without giving too much away a group of friends find a women with a stake through her hear and the story is based around whether she is a vampire or whether she was murdered....obviously there is a lot more to it than that! As always Laymons keeps you guessing throughout the book and keeps you interested int he characters from the start. This is one of his more ...  Read the complete review

This story is focused on a group of friends who stumble across a coffin containing the corpse of a female vampire who still has the stake in her chest.Through the whole story the group try to decide wether they should remove the stake from the vampires chest and what would happen if they did. In quite a morbid way larry the main character developes a crush on the vampire and starts to fantasise about her and what she would be like if she was alive. So he brings the vampire home and puts it in his garage so he can be closer to her. This is unlike ay other typical vampire story. Laymon approaches this in a totally different style there are no vampires ...  Read the complete review

The Stake is not your average vampire story. The Stake is your average Richard Laymon story though - and this might or might not be a good thing. The story is set in the present day - it starts in a hotel in a Californian ghost town. The hero of the book is a horror writer (which, I feel, is always an interesting choice for a hero when, of course, the author himself is a horror writer) who comes across a naked woman with a stake through her heart. Anyone who has read a Laymon story before will know that he is -very- good at quickly developing characters into flesh and blood personalities and then wickedly agile in ripping the flesh and blood back out ...  Read the complete review