ries of unlikely accidents begins to claim them one
by one until the survivors realize they will have to
kill the witch if they want to live.
Resurrection Dreams(1988) followed, a reimag-
ining of the story of Frankenstein’s monster. A
mentally disturbed man murders several people
then raises them from the dead, all in an attempt
to impress a girl with whom he is infatuated.
Spurned love soon turns to maniacal hatred. He
kills the girl he loved, then brings her back with a
few modifications. Laymon’s grisly details add a
strong element of dark humor to this very macabre
story. Funland(1989) is something of a letdown
and has only minimal fantastic content, but The
Stake(1990) is among his best novels. A freelance
writer stumbles upon a dead body in a deserted
building, killed by having a stake driven through
the heart. Inspired, he decides to write a book
about a demented vampire killer, runs afoul of two
separate psychopaths, and in the final pages dis-
covers that vampires are real after all.
Laymon’s next few novels are less inspired.
Several people receive warnings by way of a Ouija
board in Darkness Tells Us(1991), but they misin-
terpret the messages. An unusual and uncanny
rainstorm turns people into homicidal maniacs in
One Rainy Night(1991). Alarms(1992) features a
perfectly human, though quite vicious, villain,
about whom the female protagonist is warned in a
series of psychic visions. Several other novels from
the middle 1990s contain no element of the super-
natural, and the mixture of brutality and sexuality
began to feel very repetitious. Laymon’s next
memorable book is Bite (1996), an ambiguous
book about two people who kill what they believe
to have been a vampire, although we never learn
whether they were right, and then fall prey to con-
siderable sexual tension trying to dispose of the
body.
Body Rides(1996) is uneven but often quite
effective. The protagonist acquires the power to
briefly possess the bodies of other people, in which
manner he satisfies a number of voyeuristic im-
pulses. Once upon a Halloween(2000) also has its
good moments, but the two main plots, one of
which involves a cult of satanists and the other a
malevolent spirit that lies in wait for trick-or-
treaters, clash at times. Laymon won the Bram
Stoker Award for The Traveling Vampire Show
(2000). A carnival advertises that it has a genuine
vampire among its exhibits. Some local teenagers
decide to investigate and discover that things are
even stranger than they imagined, but only after a
series of sexual encounters that are unlikely at
best. His last novel, To Wake the Dead(2003), in-
volves a reinvigorated mummy and an almost be-
wildering number of subplots.
Laymon is also reasonably productive at
shorter length, but most of his better stories ap-
peared early in his career, such as “Grab” (1982),
“The Mess Hall” (1989), “Dinker’s Pond” (1989),
and “Bad News” (1990). Much of his short fiction
appears in Out Are the Lights and Other Tales
(1993), A Good, Secret Place(1993), Fiends(1997),
and Dreadful Tales (2001). Laymon’s unconven-
tional use of overt sexuality and his talent for
presenting Grand Guignol–style grotesqueries in fa-
miliar settings marked his work as noteworthy from
the outset, and although the quality of his work was
erratic during the course of his career, his better sto-
ries and novels are likely to remain popular.Lee, Edward(1957– )
Although Edward Lee’s first horror story appeared
in the early 1980s, his career really started with
Ghouls(1988). In a small town in Maryland, a se-
ries of strange disappearances and the theft of a
body from its grave set the mood for a very
macabre story. A researcher investigating ghouls,
inhuman creatures who steal and devour dead
bodies, discovers that they are real. He tries to
study them but eventually loses control of his sub-
jects, who seek dead flesh even if they have to kill
it themselves. Coven(1991) is a less noteworthy
follow-up, the story of a secretive cult at a private
college who have acquired genuine occult powers.
Lee was more successful with Incubi(1991), in
which a police detective tries to track down a par-
ticularly vicious serial killer while a young artist
deals with a group of mysterious men who have
taken a sudden and not entirely flattering interest
in her work. The two separate story lines are
brought together and mixed with a form of de-
monic possession, blending sex and violence in
quite liberal doses. Succubi(1992) is thematicallyLee, Edward 207