What do You think about The Midnight Tour (2007)?
What a hairy crock of shite. It felt like Laymon was hard up for an idea for a book and bashed out a sequel to some of his previously successful claptrap. There’s virtually no plot in 500+ pages other than the story of Sandy and the ending is short in the extreme and as nonsensical as can be.The story is this, the full horror of the Bobo the beat has come out thanks to the events at the end of ‘The Beast House’/ (book 2) and now The Beast House is a major tourist attraction and industry having spawned world famous books and movie franchises. Each week there is a special ‘midnight tour’ and you know this is where and ou know this is where everything will climax. I the 500 pages it takes to get there very little actually happens other than people falling instantly in love and having sex with each other, people falling instantly in love and worrying if their love is reciprocated and not much else. The only thread of mild interest is the back story of Sandy, escape of the first tow book who has now birthed her own beast. I’ve criticised the previous book for having ultra-shallow whom Laymon spends no time trying to develop and here he goes too far the other way. Except, many of them are still shallow despite the major tie he puts into writing about them. All in all a long and boring waste of time with a crappy climax.
—Jak
It took me a month and a half to read this book. Combined with the size and how I wasn't able to really get into it, it took longer then it usually does for me to read a book. Like I mentioned before I couldn't really get into it, it was a bit too slow for my taste and there was just not enough excitment for me to really like it. As one of those people that hates to abandon a book once they have started reading it, I suffered through it and felt very proud of myself for finishing it. It took 500 pages to get to the tour itself, that's really what the book is about and it seemed like it dragged on forever. What Laymon did was gave background on nearly every single main character so that it would build up to the main climax and by the time he got done with the background and stuff there was 100 pages left to do the tour. The Midnight Tour pretty much finished like the first one, I don't know how the second one ended so I can't say that it finished the same way but I ended just like the first one. I didn't like, I didn't like it one bit. I read the first book in the series (really trilogy since there is only 3 books) and wasn't to impressed with that one. I didn't have the second one so I just know bits and pieces of it thanks to this book. But it probably sucked as bad as the first and third one. I have two other books by Richard Laymon and I really hope it was just the series and not the author. Dean Koontz says he a absolute treat to read and so far I thank he's an absolute travesty.
—Sam
Writers need to know their strengths. When your strength is gore and sex, and you're really not all that skilled with creating believable characters and dialogue, don't spend hundreds of pages on character development before you get to the good stuff. I abandoned this after 250 pages, and it still hadn't gotten to the good stuff--just a whole lot of stilted dialogue and characters behaving in ways that were not credible. I like cheesy horror--the Beast House, the first book in the series, didn't waste a lot of time with stuff the author isn't skilled at, and it was a cheesy blast. This one, though I found undreadable.
—Brendan
