Appeal of the Spectrally Macabre

Horror is a bleak genre, and occasionally, when our lives are steeped in dark moments, the darkness that is visible in these claustrophobic visions of the world becomes a kind of modern tragic poetry. Richard Laymon, compared with Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, John Saul, Peter Straub, Graham Masterton and Stephen King, likes to indulge in what Lovecraft called the "appeal of the spectrally macabre" in his tales. What stands for the "spectrally macabre" in Laymon's The Cellar is the sexual monstrosity associated with the Beast House: a clawed, nocturnal beast with a libido and body of exceptionally grosse and monstrous sadism, which has reigned in Malcasa Point since the beginning of the Twentieth Century. All of the characters of this novel are driven tragically somehow, by sexual abuse, or fear, or vengeance, into the morbid mythology of this small-town tourist attraction that has been the unholy site of many unexplained murders.

At the centre of Laymon's novels are the tragically destructive sexual urges, desires and delusions of the libido, or Id - human and Nature alike - that sometimes transmogrifies the world into a Freudian nightmare.