Fatman's Reviews > Night in the Lonesome October

There is little to no plot structure in this story. The events and characters in it are unrealistic and seem to happen/appear completely at random. Coupled with the first-person point of view (a guy in emotional distress, hinting at an unreliable narrator), all these factors contribute to an eerie, surreal, very atmospheric setting. Laymon's prose helped me keep reading through several facepalm moments, and it's a credit to his writing style that it manages to pull you into the story even when the plot holes are glaring and the characters and their actions make no sense.

I was expecting some sort of big reveal at the end that would tie all these nonsensical elements together into a coherent whole. Something like the entire story being a weird hallucination by the main character, riven by guilt over killing the girl who jilted him while indulging his puerile masturbatory fantasies about her very attractive friend. The old woman on the bike, the "trolls" under the bridge, the beautiful girl who appears out of and melts back into the night, the (utterly unbelievable) main bad guy - these had to be symbols for something, right? As a psychological thriller in the vein of L Ron Hubbard's "Fear", this would have made a pretty good story.

Unfortunately, I was wrong. There was no big reveal. But Laymon's style is fluid and captivating, and (for some unknown and unknowable reason) I did enjoy reading the novel, so the 1.5 stars I was going to award to "Night in the Lonesome October" turned into 2.