The Island (Roman, Laymon)

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The island (original title: Island ) is a horror novel by the American writer Richard Laymon . The original English-language version appeared in the United States in 1995. The German translation by Thomas A. Merk was first published in 2006 by Heyne Verlag . Since 2008 the book has only been available in a censored version.

action

Rupert Conway is stranded with his girlfriend Connie, their parents Andrew and Billie, their sisters Kimberly and Thelma and their husbands Keith and Wesley on a lonely Bahamas island after their yacht exploded. Suddenly they find Keith hanging dead from a tree. Billie and Rupert suspect that Wesley, who stayed on the yacht, caused the explosion and is now trying to kill the family. The suspicion is confirmed when Andrew loses his head to Wesley's violence.

Without letting Thelma know, Rupert and the other women try to outsmart Wesley with an ambush. Wesley is injured, but the plan fails and Thelma runs over to the enemy. A short time later, Thelma tries to outsmart the inexperienced Rupert with a fictitious story and sexual stimuli. The threatened family then decides to go into the jungle and take up the fight. However, a catastrophe ensues. Rupert falls into a ravine and the three women are kidnapped. After Rupert, whose case was stopped by a corpse, regains consciousness, he sets out to find the women.

He discovers a female corpse in a lagoon and comes across a mansion in a bay. He is shocked and excited at the same time when he watches at the window as Wesley and Thelma brutally rape the young girl Erin . A little later he finds Erin with her sister Alice in the jungle, where they are locked in monkey cages. You tell him the cruel truth. Her parents were murdered by Wesley, who keeps the two girls as well as Connie, Kimberly and Billie as sex slaves. Rupert sneaks into the house to find the key to the cages. After a chase and a wild fight, he kills Thelma. When he returns to the cages, Wesley has prepared a gruesome staging. He threatens to burn the gasoline doused Billie, but she manages to save herself cleverly. After Wesley kills Kimberly, Rupert overpowers him and brutally murders him. While Rupert has fun with Billie at the end, it remains to be seen whether and when the women will be released.

Reviews

Michael Drewniok describes Laymon at phantastik-couch.de as a “ master in laying wrong tracks. The purist will accuse him of lazy tricks in the course of reading, because Laymon does not shy away from brazenly shaking the plot structure ”. With regard to the many sex and violence scenes, he states that " Laymon's ugly dirty stories are exciting ". He also emphasizes the design of the novel as a diary: “ In general, it must never be forgotten that we always experience events through the filter of Rupert's letters. Can we trust him? "

Thomas Harbach complains at sf-radio.net that Laymon did not use his abilities in this novel: “ The author has transferred elements of well-known splatter films into an exotic atmosphere. [...] But one misses an interesting extrapolation of this fundamentally too simple arc of the story . "When suggesting the" lowest needs of his readers [...] he reaches into the simple cliché box and presents all masochistic women as mentally disturbed, all sadists at the same time as child molester and potential murderer and many wives as physically unsatisfied. [...] He completely renounces polarization . "

Book editions

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michael Drewniok: The island of Richard Laymon. phantastik-couch.de, accessed on April 13, 2010 .
  2. ↑ Thomas Harbach: The island of Richard Laymon. sf-radio.net, accessed April 13, 2010 .