Richard Laymon

I have only read a part of “Beast House” series and was unimpressed. The stock characters, predictable setting and the equally obvious monster. However “Funland” was different in a lot of ways from, what I have read of his “Beast House” series. It’s a book that offers us a cast of characters that is so to say the least eclectic and none the readers opinion of them shifts throughout the book. You find yourself rooting against and then for the same characters throughout as they stumble through their adolescent choices.   Ah! Yes the majority of the characters are a gang of teenagers that patrol an amusement park boardwalk “trolling”. This usually consists of terrorizing any homeless that they find after dark, at first limiting themselves to robbing and beating them their activities take an unintentional turn towards homicide. The real meat of the book isn’t the seedy boardwalk populated by gang members and panhandlers or malevolent circus freak. The thing that grabs is you is the books portrayal of