Leisure Books is publishing the restored edition of Richard Laymon‘s The Woods Are Dark as a mass market paperback this July. Editor Don D’Auria says the original version, which was published in 1981, was “edited and cut so dramatically by the publisher that the final published version bore little relation to what Dick had intended. In Dick’s autobiography, he said that he was literally reduced to tears by it. But now his daughter, Kelly, has gone back to the original manuscripts and restored the book to what it should have been. A whole plot line has been restored. The fate of a major character is now revealed for the first time. The final third of the book is dramatically different from what readers have been subjected to for all these years. For the first time ever, fans can read the book as Dick intended. After all these years, a painful wrong has been made right.”
Laymon’s web site very briefly describes the book: “In the woods are six dead trees. The Killing Trees. That’s where they take them. People like Neala and her friend Sherri and the Dills family. Innocent travellers on vacation on the back roads of California. Seized and bound, stripped of their valuables and shackled to the Trees. To wait. In the woods. In the dark…”
Laymon died in 2001 at the age of 53, having written more than thirty novels and sixty horror and mystery short stories. In addition to his fiction writing, he was also a teacher, a librarian, and a report writer for a law firm.