Even Laymon's usual thrumming prose is missing here, replaced by a faux-plucky narration (``It wasn't a job I could walk away from'' ``Right then I vowed to save her'') by 15-year-old Londoner Trevor Bentley, who, one dark-and-stormy night in 1988, goes searching for a bobby to corral the lout who's beaten his mom. Here, though, he injects them into a floundering picaresque historical about Jack the Ripper-set partly in the Old West-resulting in his only seriously dull book yet. At their best, Laymon's cackling horrors (The Stake, 1991 Night Visions 7, 1989) are the nastiest around-sleek, black- humored, skirting (if not slipping over) the edge of pornoviolence.
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