Product Description

College friends Helen, Cora, Vivian, Finley and Abilene all meet up for one week every year. Helen has a taste for horror, and this year she has chosen the Totem Pole Lodge, a deserted hotel in the backwoods with a sinister past. But the girls soon find it is not as deserted as they thought.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #141678 in Books
• Published on: 1992-09-24
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Customer Reviews

Can i only give it five stars?
This was the first of all his books I've read, i was 14 and had the flu, my mum thought it take my mind of being sick, I read it in hours(before then i never read a whole novel, never had the patience) I've read it at least four times since then. Although it storyline is not as complex as some of his others- there are depths to the characters beyond what written on the pages. I was there in that lodge, it thrilled, scared and even made me feel sad(not an often feeling for laymons characters)

Also it help me get an A in my english lit g.c.s.e, as i wrote a better review than i have here,lol.
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Scary, funny, witty, and easy reading.
I was impressed by the accessibility this book offered. The plot is not overly complex and the writing is not the best I've seen but this book had me glued from the very beginning. I must say this is the best by Richard Laymon. A real "read in a day" book.

A promising tale weakened by Laymon's usual faults
Richard Laymon had the dubious distinction of being an acclaimed American horror writer who never managed to make any serious inroads in America itself. While Europe has been reading and enjoying Laymon for years, only recently have mass market editions of some of Laymon's earlier novels begun appearing here in the United States. Unfortunately, Laymon himself is no longer with us to see America finally begin to acknowledge him, as he died an untimely death in 2001. This is the third Laymon novel I've read, and I have to say I enjoyed it much more than I did his novels Bite and One Rainy Night. The story is interesting and fast-paced, Laymon's decision to use flashbacks at critical points of the drama seemed very effective, and my anticipation to finish the novel never really dimmed. Still, though, the novel suffers from some of Laymon's traditional faults.

The setup for the story isn't bad at all. Five best friends from college made a vow to get together for a week every year and continue the wild adventures they had back in college. It's an odd quintet, really: Vivian the gorgeous model, Abilene the most rational of the group, Finley the filmmaker with her constant video camera, Cora the strong girl of the group, and the overweight horror fan Helen. It is Helen's turn to select this year's adventure, and she can't wait to get her friends out to the isolated Totem Pole Lodge and tell them the story of the unsolved mass murder that took place there a number of years earlier. A couple of the young women aren't too enthused about staying in the creepy, deserted lodge, especially after they hear the story of how locals in the hills slaughtered everyone in the lodge some time back, but they decide to at least stick it out for one night. They enjoy spending time in the hot springs underneath the lodge, but things start to get a little unnerving when they figure out that someone else has been there with them at some point. When they then discover that the car keys have been lost, they decide to camp out in the woods, search for the keys in the morning, and then get out of Dodge. Such an uneventful ending is of course not going to happen here. Nope, Death comes calling, and the girls find themselves in a fight for their very survival.

I enjoyed the first half of this novel quite a bit; there's probably too much dialogue, but the girls were certainly interesting, and the tales of their college day exploits are actually quite amazing. When sinister things begin happening, though, their actions, responses, and much of their dialogue really don't ring true for the situation in which they find themselves, and they adopt courses of action that almost defy logic. Then there is the nudity issue. When the girls arrive and check out the hot springs, they strip down to bathing suits and then forego clothes all together. OK. As things keep happening and the dream week with the girls turns into a nightmare, they continue shedding clothes. Do women in their 20s make a habit of going nude whenever they're together? Sometimes they put their clothes back on, but this just seems to be a ploy designed to let Laymon to go on and on about how their wet clothes rub against their bare skin and the like. At a certain point, the constant emphasis on the girl's nudity and bodies grows old. If these girls existed in real life, I would know more about their bodies than they do. This overemphasis on nude female bodies makes the novel seem longer than it probably should be, and the later descriptions of the group's past experiences takes something funny and risqué and turn it into something silly, immature, and downright objectionable at times. I found my connection to the characters fading when it should have been rising, and this is the main fault I find with this otherwise enjoyable read. By the time I reached the climax of the action, I cared about these characters much less than I did earlier in the book, and this took a little something away from a perfectly acceptable but less than shocking dénouement. I'll keep reading Laymon, but I fear the man's overemphasis on sex may have kept him from ever reaching his true potential as a writer.