Table of Contents
RAVE REVIEWS FOR USA TODAY BESTSELLING AUTHOR RICHARD LAYMON!
Night in the Lonesome October is scary. I havent been this scared while reading a piece of fiction in a long time.
Bentley Little, Hellnotes
Night in the Lonesome October is at once one of the eeriest, and one of the most immediate, horror novels of recent decades.
Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Sunday Express
Laymon doesnt pull any punches. Everything he writes keeps you on the edge of your seat.
Painted Rock Reviews
One of the best, and most reliable, writers working today.
Cemetery Dance
Laymon is incapable of writing a disappointing book.
New York Review of Science Fiction
Laymon always takes it to the max. No one writes like him and youre going to have a good time with anything he writes.
Dean Koontz
If youve missed Laymon, youve missed a treat.
Stephen King
Ive read every book of Laymons I could get my hands on. Im absolutely a longtime fan.
Jack Ketchum
MORE CRITICAL ACCLAIM
FOR RICHARD LAYMON!
Laymon rides hard and fast and deep. He gives us characters that are absolutely memorable.
Mehitobel Wilson, Gothic.net
An uncanny grasp of just what makes characters work. Readers turn the pages so fast they leave bum marks on the paper.
Horrorstruck
If, like me, you consider Ray Bradburys Something Wicked This
Way Comes an American classic, you are in for a real treat. The
Traveling Vampire Show will put you in the same vicarious world
that no one has entered since the master.
Denver Rocky Mountain News
Laymon is an American writer of the highest caliber.
Time Out (U.K.)
Laymon is unique. A phenomenon. A genius of the grisly and the grotesque.
Joe Citro, The Blood Review
Laymons writings super-tight and characters well detailed and believable, which makes the savage termination of so many of them all the more shocking! The unbridled joy of a delightfully fertile and wicked imagination at work.
Terrorzone
Laymon has been putting out outstanding book after book.
Delirium Magazine
Richard Laymon is a legend in dark fiction circles ... a master of the macabre, a man on the cutting edge of the horror genre.
Scary Monsters Magazine
ATTACKERS IN THE NIGHT
Somebody slammed into me from the right. The impact twisted me and sent me stumbling sideways through the dark. I tripped over my own feet, fell as if making a dive into shallow water, and slammed against the ground so hard that I skidded.
In the distance past my feet, Eileen cried out, Eddie! Get him off me!
I heard a smack like a fist striking bare skin.
Leave her alone! I yelled.
As I struggled to get up, I realized that Id lost my knife. I had to have it Dropping to my knees, I swept my hands over the ground.
Eileen whined ... part pain, part terror.
The hell with the knife .
I grabbed a heavy, jagged rock that was larger than my hand, scrambled to my feet and rushed toward the sounds from Eileen and what was happening to her.
The sounds sickened me. Sobs and giggles, punches and slaps, yelps of pain, gasps for air, muttered curses, wet slurps, frenzied grunts....
Other Leisure books by Richard Laymon:
ISLAND
THE MUSEUM OF HORRORS
IN THE DARK
THE TRAVELING VAMPIRE SHOW
AMONG THE MISSING
ONE RAINY NIGHT
BITE
To Jerry and Jackie Lentz, our fine friends
who always seem to know what were laughing about
A LEISURE BOOK
September 2002
Published by
Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
276 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10001
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as unsold and destroyed to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this stripped book.
Copyright C 2001 by Richard Laymon
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.
ISBN: 0-8439-5046-3
The name Leisure Books and the stylized L with design are trademarks of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
Visit us on the web at www.dorchesterpub.com.
AUTHORS NOTE
Casey at the Bat, a poem by Ernest Lawrence Thayer, was first published under the pen name Phin in the San Francisco Examiner on June 3,1888. The classic poem contains the famous final stanza:
Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright, The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light; And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville: Mighty Casey has struck out.
The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crisped and sere
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year ...
Ulalume
Edgar Allan Poe
Chapter One
I was twenty years old and heartbroken the night it started.
My name is Ed Logan.
Yes, guys can be heartbroken, too. It isnt an affliction reserved for women only.
Except I think it feels more like an empty stomach than a broken heart. An aching hollowness that food cant cure. You know. Youve felt it yourself, I bet. You hurt all the time, youre restless, you cant think straight, you sort of wish you were dead but what you really want is for everything to be the same as it was when you were still with her ... or him.
In my case, her name was Holly Johnson.
Holly Johnson.
God. Id better not get started on her. Suffice it to say I fell in love with Holly with all my stupid heart and soul last spring when we were both sophomores at Willmington University. And she seemed to be in love with me. But then the semester ended. I went home to Mill Valley and she went home to Seattle where she worked as a guidance counselor at some sort of fucking summer camp and got involved with some other counselor. Only I didnt hear about that until two weeks into the fall semester. I knew she wasnt on campus, but didnt know why. Her sorority sisters pleaded ignorance. On the phone, her mother was evasive. Holly isnt home just now, but Ill tell her you called.
Then, on October first, a letter came. Dear Ed, I will always cherish the times we had ... And so on. It might as well have been a letter bomb ... a letter carrying a voodoo bomb that first killed me, then resurrected me as a zombie.
The night after receiving the letter, I stayed in my apartment all by myself, drinking vodka (bought by a friend of legal age) and orange juice until I passed out. In the morning, I cleaned up the vomit. Then I had to live through the worst hangover of my life. Luckily, the letter had arrived on Friday. By Monday, Id mostly recovered from my hangover. But not from my loss.
