Books like The Stake

When a horror author and his wife, along with their friends, visit Sagebrush Flats, a ghost town near their home, they stumble upon a truly bizarre discovery - the withered corpse of a woman with a stake driven through her heart. Was she a vampire? The only way to find out is to pull the stake, see if she reanimates.The blurb on the back of this delightful novel ( in my opinion, one of Laymon's best) has to be one of the worst I have read This book has several storylines woven together, and it takes a while to pick up steam, but when it does, look out.Though slow at times, this book really delivers some excellent writing, a great cast of characters, a heaping dollop of wry humor, and some chilling horror.As I read through Laymon's immense output, I often find him to be hot or miss, never totally bad, sometimes brilliant.The Stake is high on the awesome list for me. I would say it holds its own with some of Laymon's other gems, like ISLAND, AFTER MIDNIGHT and BODY RIDES.Fun, crazy and disturbing, never takes itself too seriously.My only gripe is that there are multitudinous rehash scenes. There always seems to be a character who needs to be brought up to snuff on what happened in the previous chapter. I found myself skimming through in several places, but if you read Laymon, this is nothing new.