This made me feel nothing but occasionally infuriated at the numbskull decisions these personality-less characters repeatedly make, which of course is part and parcel for this sort of thing, but I can usually have some fun despising the awful characters and rooting for their demises. At least Laymon, when dealing with similar subject matter, makes me feel, if not actually scared, then like taking a shower just to wash the filth off my body makes me feel disgusted or disturbed periodically, even when the violence is overtly cartoonish. I don't always need fully-realized characters when I'm in the mood for pulp horror, but I do need SOME-thing that separates it from the glut of similar novels from the era. Family takes vacation in secluded mountainous area where local legend speaks of cannibalistic cave creatures who feast on the unsuspecting, but Clark - who for some reason I always thought was female until recently - has a paint-by-numbers prose-style that did nothing to draw me in or make me care one whit about the characters. I'm not one to turn my nose up at the trashier side of horror, including ole' Dick, but this is pretty much a run-of-the-mill, d-grade Laymon story minus the gratuitous, perverted thoughts of every single character ever. The only people I could see considering this a gem would be those who love Richard Laymon. I've been wanting to score a (reasonably-priced) copy of this for years, as I vaguely remember it having had a bit of a reputation in the horror fiction community back in the day as being some sort of hidden, disturbing gem.

The feeding leigh clark