The Cellar by Richard Laymon

A few weeks ago I was looking through some paperbacks at a West Virginia antique store and, besides a 1972 Fawcett Peanuts book (What Now, Charlie Brown?) and a 1970s New Directions Paperbook printing of Celine's Death on the Installment Plan (trans. Ralph Manheim), I picked up a seriously damaged copy of The Cellar by Richard Laymon, enticed by the idea that this was a book about "sadistic sensuality" and "sexual enslavement" and by its cost: 50 cents.  (What Now, Charlie Brown? was also $0.50, while the Celine was $1.00.)  

I didn't know anything about Laymon, and to avoid spoilers (I can dish out the spoilers, but I can't take them!) I didn't look up any discussions of his work or reviews of The Cellar online before reading the novel's 250 pages.  Those pages go by pretty quickly, the font being on the large side and there being plenty of blank space between most of the twenty-six chapters, which are preceded by a prologue and followed by an epilogue.

The Cellar is a pretty simple book, a relentless succession of gore and scenes of unconventional sex; many people are tortured and murdered, and many people, mostly but not exclusively women and girls, are sexually abused and raped.  The characters lack personality and their motivations are unexplored and at times their behavior is hard to believe.  The Cellar is like a book written by a kid who just wanted to get to the scenes of violence and came up with various scenarios which would, just barely, set the stage to talk about gruesome injuries, people vomiting, and about the violation of women's bodies--there is no development of tone or atmosphere, the story is all incident, one disgusting event after another.  The fights and crimes do not constitute oases of interest in the desert of blandness, however--from start to finish there is no discernible writing style or effort to inspire or manipulate the reader's emotions, everything is written plainly, matter-of-factly, there is no passion, no gusto to the writing, even in the episodes of violence.  The monsters aren't even described with any care or any flair, so you can't really picture them vividly in your mind--with one exception: Laymon provides a clear description of the monster's idiosyncratic penises, he seemingly having devoted all his creativity to developing alien genitalia.

I found a number of scenes in The Cellar surprising, and some amusing, because of their absurdity, their inability to convince.  I often enjoy fiction that is crazy or off the wall, like that of A. E. van Vogt and Barry N. Malzberg, but their stories generally have some kind of point to make and have a sort of internal philosophical consistency, their work is in dialogue with other fiction and with real life.  I tried to find some kind of theme or point to The Cellar--was Laymon saying something about how we are all driven by our sexual desires to break the rules and take stupid risks, or about how the entertainment industry exploits our base desires, or about the pervasive fear of crime in the time period in which it was written?--but I had to conclude that Laymon was just narrating one atrocity after another, these atrocities having little to do with each other and being presented with no ring of truth and no human feeling, not even the mischievous child's joy of breaking taboos or saying things you aren't supposed to say.    

A quick look at isfdb suggests that The Cellar was a commercial success: it has been printed many times in America and Europe, even in a $50.00 limited edition hardcover, and has spawned sequels that are collectively known, and it is hard to say this without smiling at the absurdity of it, The Beast House Chronicles.  Chronicles!  Famed horror blogger Will Errickson of Too Much Horror Fiction and Paperbacks from Hell blogged about The Cellar in 2011 and just recently about its sequel The Beast House and had a reaction similar to mine--in fact, anything interesting I might have said above he had already said.  This blog post was rendered superfluous before I even started it!

Well, I won't be reading anything else by Richard Laymon.  A decisive thumbs down for The Cellar.  I took a lot of notes on the plot of The Cellar, and in case anybody is curious about what it is all about or wants to see some evidence for my hostile review, I offer my ludicrously long blow-by-blow plot synopsis below.

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In the Prologue, it is night and a police officer sees a light in The Beast House, a Victorian house that is a sort of tourist attraction with a ticket booth in front of it.  Inside, a father is forcing his son to explore the house with him--Dad doesn't want his son to believe in nonsense like monsters.  (We later learn their name is Ziegler.) The monster attacks, kills skeptical father and believer son alike before the cop, who hears their screams, can get in through the turnstile and locked door.  (If it's locked, how did father and son get in? Is this a locked room mystery?)  The cop has brought his shotgun, but forgotten his flashlight, so he trips over the fresh corpses in the dark.  Then the monster pounces on him before he can bring his 12-gauge to bear.

In Chapter One we meet Donna and her twelve-year-old daughter Sandy.  Donna's ex-husband Roy--Sandy's father--is some kind of dangerous criminal, and it is implied that he sexually molested Sandy--we later learn her raped her.  According to Sandy, Roy said he would track them down and kill them after he got out of prison.  Uh oh, Donna just got a phone call warning her that her husband just got released from prison!  D & S flee home--Santa Monica--and drive northwards.  Laymon makes sure to tell us every time the ladies go to the bathroom on their long drive--whether this is supposed to instill in us feelings of vulnerability or appeal to readers with some kind of golden shower fetish, I don't know.  Donna drives into a fog bank near Bodega Bay (Google is telling me Bodega Bay is 440 miles from Santa Monica) and right into a ditch.  Sandy has to pee and there is a whole scene of her going to the woods to urinate and getting lost (Donna gets her own peeing in the woods scene later.)  

A person who is intellectually disabled (Sandy behind his back calls him a "retard" and then admits she knows you are supposed to call such people "special") and is also missing several fingers and afflicted with a trick knee appears; Donna is scared of him and assaults him, knocking him unconscious.  When he wakes up everybody makes friends and he drives them to the town where he lives and works--this special individual works at The Beast House as the janitor!  To prove how friendly he is, he gives Donna and Sandy some free passes for a tour of The Beast House!  Sandy, who five pages ago was sobbing with fear about getting murdered, is thrilled at the idea of going to a tourist attraction whose theme is getting fucking murdered!  I guess kids really are resilient!

In Chapter Two we meet Roy, Donna's husband, just released from the big house.  He tricks his way into a private house and inside murders a man and then his wife and then rapes their ten-year-old daughter; Laymon describes in detail the murders and his disrobing and caressing of the little girl, but the cameras go dark just before he penetrates her as three feet away her mother's bloody corpse cools.

In Chapter Three we meet two men who are plagued by nightmares--they are living in the same apartment building and meet when one hears the other's screams and recognizes the screams of a man having a nightmare.  It's like the secret handshake of an exclusive club!  Larry, as a kid in 1951, sneaked into The Beast House with a friend and escaped after seeing his friend killed and raped by the monster.  We learn the background of The Beast House from this guy and a newspaper clipping he shares; his nightmares are about The Beast House--the recent ones were triggered by newspaper stories about the killings, three weeks ago, of the Zieglers and that cop.  The other guy, Jud, was having nightmares are about being attacked by an army of black people, some "Nubians, dressed like pimps" with Kalashnikovs, others naked savages with spears.  "Jud" is short for Judgement--this guy's father was a Baptist minister.  I figured Jud must be a villain--not only is he connected to organized religion, and not only does he have racist dreams, but it is implied he is a hitman!

Chapter Four covers the detective work Roy undertakes when he isn't raping the ten-year-old girl.  In  Chapter Five, Donna and Sandy meet Larry and Jud, who have come to investigate The Beast House--Larry has hired Jud to kill the beast.  Donna and Sandy are stuck in the town, which has only one motel--a bunch of cabins--until their car is repaired.  Donna immediately has a crush on masculine Jud--when he looks at her it "set[s] warm fluid spreading in her loins."  Oh, brother!  Layman further bolsters the page-to-sex-content ratio by describing the breasts of the teenaged girl whose parents own the motel when she briefly appears on scene--her revealing clothes make Donna think, "The girl's going to get herself raped,"--foreshadowing!--and by having the widow of Mr. Ziegler, mentally unhinged, appear at The Beast House and feverishly denounce the tourists waiting in line at the ticket booth, baring her breasts, which we are told are very large.

Chapter Six is about the tour of the Beast House given our four main characters and a dozen other tourists by the owner of the house, Maggie Kutch, wife and mother of the victims of the second attack, in 1931.  We learn how Mr. Ziegler got into the Beast House (mystery solved!) and, later in Chapter Seven when Donna, Sandy, Jud and Larry go to the beach, that Maggie is mother to that "special" janitor, born after the murders and fathered by a boyfriend.  (At the beach Jud and Donna are already holding hands--that is quick work!) 

In Chapter Eight Roy tortures Donna's sister and gets one step closer to his wife and daughter.  In Chapter Nine Jud stakes out The Beast House at night, sitting in the woods behind the place.  We get more clues to his background--the source of his nightmares is the assassination her performed of a fictional African tyrant it appears is based on Idi Amin.  He sees Mrs. Zielger sneak into the house and follows her; she is there to burn the place down, but she is already dead when Jud catches up to her, not even having had time to take the cap off her can of gasoline.  Jud tangles with the beast but it gets away.

Chapter Ten covers part of Roy's road trip north; the ten-year-old girl is in the trunk.  He camps in the woods at night and Laymon describes how he abuses his captive, and plays a little trick on us, making us think he's killed her, but she's still alive in Chapter 13, in which she suffers further abuse before and after Roy kills two people in gory fashion in the process of stealing their car.  

In Chapter 11 Donna helps Jud bandage his wounds and they have sex, then Larry, Jud and Donna discuss their theories of who or what the monster is and what its motives are.  Larry, and the owners of the house/tourist attraction, insist the monster, which is only active at night, has killed eleven people since the first attack in 1903, but the government insists that all eleven of those victims were slain by garden variety knife-wielding criminals, and that the different murders are unconnected.  Larry is sure the monster is driven by lust and rapes its victims, but Maggie insists none of the beast's victims were raped.  Jud thinks a man in a suit killed Mrs. Ziegler and only raped her incidentally; he suspects Maggie and her family are behind the recent killings as they attract tourists.  In Chapter 12 Jud takes the tour of Beast House again, and Maggie and her boyfriend make no mention of the death of Mrs. Ziegler.

In Chapter 14 Donna telephones her sister's house and a police officer named Woo tells her her sister and brother-in-law were murdered.  In a surprising bit of comic relief, Woo keeps saying "So" on the phone, like a caricature of an Oriental.  In Chapter 15 Jud declares he will protect Donna and Sandy from Roy, and in Chapter 16 he and Larry sneak into the strange brick house where Maggie, Maggie's boyfriend, and their retarded adult son Axel live.  The house has no windows, and they find lots of BDSM gear in there, and a diary from the turn of the century which they steal.  Chapters 17, 18 and 19 cover Roy's arrival in town, his kidnapping and raping of the teenage daughter of the motel's owner, and his appropriation of a cabin from which he can watch Donna's cabin.  

Chapter 20 is devoted to Jud and Donna's reading of the 1903 diary, which was written by the mother of the victims of the first beast attack.  She was a widow with two kids living in what would come to be known as the Beast House.  In her diary, she describes getting engaged and having sex with her fiancé and this turns Jud and Donna on so they have sex.  Then comes the significant part of the diary.  The diarist finds a tunnel has been dug into her cellar and some one has been stealing the food she has been canning.  One day she meets the tunneller--it isn't some impoverished urchin, but a monster that proceeds to rape her!  The monster's penis has what amounts to a mouth and tongue, which means it is very good at providing pleasure to women, and so the diarist not only enjoys being raped, but falls in love with the beast!  Everyday she goes down to the cellar to have rough sex with the monster, and her body becomes covered with wounds.  She dumps her fiancé and sends her kids on a vacation so she can invite the monster into the house proper and have sex as much as possible with it!  

Chapters Twenty-One to Twenty-Six are the action climax of The Cellar.  Roy attacks, but Jud captures him.  Larry and Jud take Roy to the Beast House to use him as bait.  The beast kills Roy, and Larry attacks it with a machete, decapitating it.  But then a second beast appears and slays Larry.  Jud, with a .45 automatic, shoots this second beast, chases it through the tunnel described in the diary to the brick BDSM house.  It turns out there is a whole family of monsters, like eight or ten of them!  Hearing the fighting, Donna, armed with Jud's bolt action rifle, comes to help.  Jud busts into the mirrored sex room to find Maggie having group sex with monsters, and he kills quite a few of the beasts; meanwhile, Donna is fighting with Axel, who tries to rape her.  The last lines of the last full chapter describe Jud's disbelief as Maggie kills him with a knife.

In the Epilogue we learn that Donna and Sandy have been seized and are slaves of Maggie and the surviving monsters, and actually enjoy having sex with them.  Donna is even pregnant with the first of the next generation of beasts!