The Premise
The Beast House still stands in Malcasa Point, and its proprietors continue to hold daily tours of its grisly interior. In this small town, two young women, two recently discharged Marines, and a successful horror novelist will meet each other through chance, and learn the truth about the Beast House mythology. This is the second book in The Beast House Chronicles.
In Review
The Beast House is a continuation of the tale that Richard Laymon began in The Cellar. The sexually insatiable beasts that hunt near an old manor in a small, fictitious town on the coast of California are back, along with characters who survived the events of the first book. It is the events of this initial installment that draw the latest crop of protagonists to the Beast House, and Laymon does a good job tying the two books together through connections both large and small. He also expands on the mythology of the Beast House, and offers an origin, however brief, for the beasts.
You don't have to read The Cellar to follow the plot of its sequel, but I recommend starting with it anyway, if only to experience its frequent and graphic violence, and some bizarre sexual content. Expecting more of the same in the follow-up, I was surprised to find that Laymon cut back the gory stuff, and emphasized a romance that develops between two of the characters. The eponymous beasts don't show up until the last third of the book, and, along with the returning human characters, their involvement is minimal.
The tone and structure of Beast House is so different from that of The Cellar, it's as if the former is an inversion of the latter. In The Cellar, the female protagonists are on the run from an abusive man; in the sequel, the heroine is searching for a man that could very well be her soul-mate. The first book is rife with brutality and sex, while the second has sporadic bouts of bloody deeds. Finally, the mood of The Cellar is claustrophobic, feral, unhinged, and ultimately depressing; in The Beast House, there is a sense of hope, reinforced by the competence and bravado that fictional Marines usually bring to a story.
That said, both books do share Laymon's preference for random violence, in which characters commit murder without forethought or hesitation, then cover up the act and move on. It's as if Laymon thought that every person has a capacity for violence that is but one circumstance away from being realized. Without any moral grounding, this trope can be - baffling - as in one scene, which goes from ordinary to gruesome in a few sentences, and leaves the perpetrator unchanged in any psychological sense. Since Laymon's prose is so spare, it's hard to tell if these actions stem from a predilection for violence, or the demands of a violent horror novel.
When I learned that Laymon wrote a series based on the Beast House premise, I was curious: wouldn't the authorities start to notice the rising body count in a small town? Then I realized that I was looking at the plot from a twenty-first century vantage, when in fact the Beast House books take place during the mid-to-late seventies - well before cell phones and national databases and multi-jurisdictional police efforts. In this respect, Laymon's Beast House tales belong to an earlier era of horror, when remote locations offered the prospect of getting lost in a grim adventure, cut off from the friendlier pockets of society. Therein lay the horror: even in what was then the modern world, civilization had its limits. I wonder - are such boundaries still out there?
4/15/07
Read a review of the first Beast House book - The Cellar.
