Last week I read Clive Barker’s novella The Hellbound Heart. It’s good, but it is the book that Hellraiser is based on, so I suppose it is pretty obvious that it is a good read. I’ve only seen the film once and that was a long time ago and so I can’t really make a comparison between book and film.
I also read Richard Laymon’s The Travelling Vampire Show for the second time. It was one of the first few Laymon books that I ever read and I loved it. The second time around, I still love it. It’s great. I remember when I first started reading Laymon’s work I tried to figure out why I liked it so much. The answer is simple. It’s the characters, they seem very real. It doesn’t matter what situations that they get into they always feel real and, as a reader, I care about the characters in a Laymon book, and if a writer can make you care about the characters the battle is half won.