The Traveling Vampire Show
by Richard Laymon
Summary
Grandville, 1963, one August day, sunrise to midnight. Posters have appeared overnight: for one night only, at Janks Field outside town, the Traveling Vampire Show will exhibit Valeria, the only known vampire in captivity, beautiful, deadly, adults only. Dwight is sixteen, and he, his best friend Rusty and Slim, the tomboy bookworm Dwight is slowly realising he loves, want nothing in the world but to get in.
Laymon holds the show offstage for nearly the whole novel, and the day itself becomes the book: the trio's expedition to Janks Field for an advance look, the vicious dog that draws first blood and scatters them, the schemes to raise tickets and cover stories, encounters with the town's adults, some kind, some frightening, some both, and the constant weather of adolescent desire, which Laymon writes with a frankness that kept mainstream publishers wary and rings true anyway. The Grandville day has its own quiet menace, bruises glimpsed under a mother's makeup, a stranger's van, adults whose kindness carries a hook, so that by the time night falls and the trio finally sit in the bleachers at Janks Field, the reader has learned the book's real lesson, that the town contains worse than vampires, just before the show delivers on every poster's promise and the day's accumulated dread cashes out in a final burst of pure Laymon carnage.
Around four hundred and forty pages that read like one sitting.
Best for readers who want the summer of 63 nostalgia piece with teeth, Bradbury's carnival run by a splatter craftsman.
Historical Context & Significance
The Traveling Vampire Show won the Bram Stoker Award for 2000, and the win turned memorial before it could even be handed over: Richard Laymon died of a heart attack in February 2001, at fifty four, and the prize, awarded posthumously, became the community's farewell to one of its most loved and most peculiar careers.
Peculiar because of the geography: Laymon, a Californian, was a bestseller in Britain and Australia through dozens of paperback originals while remaining nearly out of print in his own country, an American master kept alive by import shops, a wrong his estate and Leisure Books' reprints spent the following decade correcting. The Stoker, arriving for his gentlest and most character driven book, read to the faithful as overdue recognition for the whole shelf.
His influence runs wide in the splatter and extreme horror lines that followed, Ketchum his peer, half of modern paperback horror his descendants; public praise from Stephen King and Dean Koontz had trailed him for years, and it served as the epitaph