Blood Games - Richard Laymon

Meet Helen (plain tubby chick with a taste for the macabre),Cora (athletic confident phys
ed teacher),Vivian (gorgeous model city type),Finley (oversexed tomboy film
producer)and Abilene (pretty,intelligent english grad) five old college buddies with a pact
to meet once a year to maintain contact and go off in search of adventures.Every year a
different girl gets to chose their location and this year it's Helens turn.

For her choice Helen has picked an abandoned remote backwater holiday camp called The
Totem Pole Lodge,what Helen hasn't told the others is that this was the scene of a
gruesome massacre several years earlier when the locals had attacked and slaughtered all
the guests in retaliation to the "accidental" shooting of a local girl.

The first day goes reasonably well.The girls explore the lodge and surrounding area and
lounge in the thermal heated pool (where Helen fills them in on the history of the lodge)
and a few minor scares when someone throws their clothes in the pool and they spot a
teenage boy running for the surrounding woods.

Sufficiently freaked out they decide to leave when they realize the car keys are
missing.After a fruitless search they camp hidden away from the lodge in the forest.When
they awaken the next morning Helen is gone.

What did I think?

Great story.The characters are really in depth and you feel yourself empathising with
them.The whole book has been divided into flashbacks of how they all met and their
adventures through college together and their previous yearly expeditions to the present
excursion beginning with the arrival at the lodge.

Would I recommend it?

Definitely!Though this doesn't have the body count of some of Laymons other works it
has a lot more suspense and you’re glad he doesn't kill off most of the main characters (as
he does in so many of his other books) because you find yourself liking them all.