Richard Laymon - To Wake The Dead

i Amara was once the beautiful Princess of Egypt. Now, 4000 years later, she and her coffin are merely prized exhibits of the Charles Ward Museum. If you were to look at her today, you would see only a brittle bundle of bones and dried skin. But looks can be very deceiving, as Barney, the museums night watchman, finds out . Barney is the first to make the shocking discovery that the mummys coffin has been broken open. But he doesnt have a chance to do anything about it.

Amara is once again freed from the cramped confines of her coffin, free to walk the earth, free to stalk her prey. Free to kill. Nothing can satisfy her bloodlust. And no one can stop her. You cannot kill what is already dead. Grade-A Laymon.

Will leave even jaded readers gasping! Publishers Weekly Raw, uninhibited horror at its classic best. Five stars! SFX Magazine Ive read everything of Laymons I could get my hands on. Absolutely a longtime fan. -Jack Ketchum ii Rave Reviews for Richard Laymon and To Wake the Dead This exuberantly entertaining horror novel is grade-A Laymon. [It] hurtles from start to finish. Publishers Weekly Richard Laymon is an award-winning author and after reading this book it is easy to see why.

To Wake the Dead is a very scary novel, so frightening that readers will go to bed with the lights on. The Midwest Book Review Pedal to the metal, hi-octane horror. Spectacular! SFX Magazine A brilliant and terrifying excursion into fear. Tapestry Magazine iii More Praise for Richard Laymon! Ive always been a Laymon fan. He manages to raise serious gooseflesh. Bentley Little 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 A brilliant writer. Sunday Express Ive read every book of Laymons I could get my hands on. Im absolutely a longtime fan.

Jack Ketchum, author of Peaceable Kingdom iv One of horrors rarest talents. -Publishers Weekly Laymon is, was and always will be king of the hill. Horror World Laymon is an American writer of the highest caliber. Time Out Laymon is unique. A phenomenon. A genius of the grisly and the grotesque.

Joe Citro, The Blood Review 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 v Other Leisure books by Richard Laymon: THE LAKE ENDLESS NIGHT BODY RIDES BLOOD GAMES NO SANCTUARY DARKNESS, TELL US NIGHT IN THE LONESOME OCTOBER ISLAND THE MUSEUM OF HORRORS (anthology) IN THE DARK THE TRAVELING VAMPIRE SHOW AMONG THE MISSING ONE RAINY NIGHT BITE vi RICHARD LEISURE BOOKS NEW YORK CITY vii LEISURE BOOKS November 2004 Published by Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc. 200 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 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 2003 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 0-8439-5468X The name Leisure Books and the stylized I 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. viii To Wake the Dead: As long as I have been on Earth, which is longer than Microsoft Word 5.0 but not longer than the English language, Ive been involved in only two traffic accidents.

They occurred a little more than a year apart, and the circumstances were eerily the same; I should not have survived either incident, and certainly should not have survived unscathed, but I did. In the first instance, my wife and I were in a large sedan, stopped at a controlled intersection, on our way to dinner, when a car hit us from behind at (the police estimated) 55 mph, without braking. That day, with spring approaching, Id had the snow tires taken off the rear wheels and replaced with springtime rubber. The snow tires had been stored temporarily in the trunk of the car until I could tuck them aside in a corner of the garage for use the next winter. When we were hit from behind, the stored tires were two enormous shock absorbers; however, even with the protection they provided, the rear half of the sedan was spectacularly crushed, compacted into about two feet of mangled ruins that were shoved against our headrests. The back doors folded like accordions.

The front doors buckled and would not open. The gasoline tank ruptured and sprayed fuel into the passengers compartment. Incredibly, the engine was still runningand wouldnt shut off. Expecting fire or explosion, I needed perhaps a frantic half minute to wrench open a buckled door. Our sedan was totaled, but the car that hit us was totaled and quashed. ix We thought the driver of the other vehicle must be dead, but to our amazement, as we hurried to him, he struggled out of his demolished coupe, as unharmed as we were.

As it turned out, he was a sixteen-year-old boy who had gotten his drivers license a month previous; he had bought his first car that morning. Regarding the wreckage with disgust, he looked at us and said, I didnt need this, as though he suspected that we, unlike him, had been driving around with no sane purpose but with the mad hope of being hit from behind and killed. We had just paid off our car loan that day. Fourteen months later, having moved three thousand miles from Pennsylvania to California, we were stopped at a traffic light, on our way to dinner (going out to a restaurant is seldom viewed as the extremely dangerous undertaking our experience has proved it to be) when a car hit us from behind at (the police estimated) 55 mph, without braking. This time we were in a small sports car, a Mercedes 450 SL, which had no backseat. Because the Mercedes was solidly constructed and brilliantly engineered, the fuel tank didnt rupture and the doors didnt buckle; we got out of the vehicle unscratched.

The car that had hit us, a large sedan, looked as if it had been nuked. We were sure the occupant must be dead or seriously injured. We hurried to the drivers door. The window was broken out. The door had buckled. The woman inside was alivebut obviously intoxicated.

When we told her to stay calm, that we would get her out, she cursed us and said, I didnt need this, putting the emphasis on the word need, precisely as the young driver had done fourteen months ago in Pennsylvania. I couldnt get her out of the car, and even the police, who arrived within two minutes, had trouble extracting the woman, not because she was pinned in the wreckage but because she was determined to stay in there rather than get out and have to face a breathalyzer test. As had happened fourteen months earlier in Pennsylvania, Gerda had made the final payment on our car loan that very morning. The uncanny similarity of the details of these two accidents suggests to meas do so many things in lifea world that operates not always according to the predictable laws of physics and chance, but also and perhaps as often under the influence of a mysterious power with a delightfully byzantine sense of story and with an agenda that is, though perhaps not inscrutable, challenging to analyze and understand. Pondering the significance of these two accidents, Gerda and I posi(ed all sorts of possible meanings and messages to be derived from our experiences. I thought it logical, for example, never to halt at another traffic light or stop sign, but to cruise blithely through the intersection with the expectation that to stop would be to invite an inevitable rear-end collision.