Nothing really happened in this book. It was an entire book of filler and tension builder but no climax or resolution, rather disappointing. Hopefully with the next book having to be all climax and resolution it will have a made this book worth the read.

You could say relationships were strengthened characters were developed but I feel all of that was implied with the last book and would have been understood without using a whole book to spell it out. But maybe this series is geared towards a younger reader.

I really enjoy the world she has created which is why I keep reading the books, however the way it is written leaves something to be desired.

and on a final note it should not take 3 books to decide if meg and Simon like each other or not in a more than friends way. It was obvious in book 1 that is where the story wanted to go, dragging it out is painful. spoiler alert we still don't know if they like each other or not. Either make them family or romantic, stop bouncing back and forth. ( )

"Beast House" series-wise, this was disappointing. The story is only 141 pages long, the last line is stupid, and it does not, repeat does not, pick up where book three ended, and book three left a lot of loose ends! The only connection between this short story and the trilogy is the house, the beast, and a brief, brief appearance by officer Eve Chaney. This story is just about two high school kids who go into the Beast House after hours. Fin. It does beg the question though - why does the town allow this place to continue to exist after all the rapes and deaths? Weird.

To make this a "book", the short story "The Wilds" is included in this volume. It’s written in the style of a diary, and contains two great quotes by Thoreau, “I’ve found few companions so companionable as solitude.", and “As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.” and another from "Julius Caesar", "Danger knows full well that I am more dangerous than he." It's a pretty good tale - a young man goes off camping in the wilderness by himself, then slowly descends into "the wild". Good twist in the last entry too! For entertainment purposes, this story is better than the title story! ( )

A fairly short novel, but it's characteristic of Richard Laymon's writing. Basically it's a written form of a teenage horror movie, with a bit of sex, and male teenage fantasies. It's written well enough to keep you interested despite the somewhat dodgy storyline. A good starting point for someone wanting to see what the author's books are like. ( )

I wouldn't classify this as horror; monster porn, maybe?

Also - it is not a novel, but a short novella, with few multi-sentence paragraphs to be found. High literacy level is not a reading requirement here.

I know little of Laymon's biography, other than that he has maintained a fairly high level of post-mortem popularity and a penchant for extreme bad taste. If I was a betting man, the choose-your-own-adventure level of writing on display here would have me wager that this was a very early work, probably completed by a teenaged Laymon in high school.

The vast majority of the novella is pointless procrastination without suspense or anything of much interest happening, "boy meets out-of-league girl and will do anything to impress until it all goes wrong" is the genre trope, done much better by Ketchum in an early novel (Hide and Seek) of his, IMO.

I only rate this book as highly as I have because of the "did I really just read that?" ending, which crosses line after line in rapid succession.

I still didn't understand the final sentence of the book, though. It felt as though something was missing, or that Laymon assumed the reader would "get it". I didn't.

I recommend that any curious readers save themselves thirty minutes of tedium and read only the final pages for the shock value alone, then move on to something much more edifying. ( )

There were actually two kind of short stories in this one: Friday Night in Beast House and The Wilds.

The Beast House was from an adolescent boy's point of view, including his rather detailed imagination. Good story, with a weird end.

The Wilds totally rocked. A young man goes camping alone, journaling his trip. He's kind of freaked out at first by being alone in the wild and all of the things that could go wrong. His journal explores his descent into madness. Very cool ( )