Product Description

The only witness to a crime committed by Jack the Ripper, fifteen-year-old Trevor Bentley grows into manhood and travels on a quest of vengeance across a wild and untamed continent.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #121093 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 448 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780843957518
• BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
• Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

From Publishers Weekly
Relating a gruesome story through the first-person narrative of an ingenuous 15-year-old boy, horror novelist Laymon ( The Stake ) appears to aim at the complex tone of Huckleberry Finn . He doesn't even come close, although that parallel might explain his London-born narrator's curiously un-British speech patterns ("gas lamps didn't give off a whole lot of light"). After witnessing Jack the Ripper's final murder on the streets of Whitechapel in 1888, Trevor Bentley is pursued by the psychopath into the Thames and ends up as his prisoner on a yacht bound for America. Improbable plot twists take both characters to Arizona, where the Ripper wreaks havoc while Trevor encounters a couple of snake-oil salesmen, rides with a bandit gang, becomes a crack shot and falls in love with pert, 16-year-old Jesse Sue Longley. The young couple survive a gore-splattered encounter with the Ripper in an Arizona cave, going on to marriage and a career in the snake-oil business. The grisly mutilation scenes induce no horror, Trevor's unrelenting innocence becomes tiresome, and his byplay with Jesse skirts soft-core kiddy-porn.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In 1888, Following a disturbance at home, Trevor Bentley's mother sends the 15-year-old to find his uncle, a constable on the London police force. Trevor embarks on a bizarre sequence of adventures, beginning with his witnessing Jack the Ripper at work. Over the next few months, the Ripper and Trevor pursue each other across the Atlantic and on to Arizona, sometimes exchanging roles of hunter and the hunted. Laymon's other horror novels include The Stake (St. Martin's, 1992) and, under the pseudonym Richard Kelly, Midnight's Lair (St Martin's, 1991). He is an accomplished wordsmith, but Savage 's plot falters with too many improbabilities and the author's denigrating peep show presentation of his women characters. Not a necessary puchase.
- Robert Jordan, Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Laymon's hero, 15-year-old Brit Trevor Bentley, has a run-in with none other than Jack the Ripper himself in London's East End in 1888. Before he knows it, Trevor finds himself shanghaied to America by the evil Ripper, and after escaping the murderer, the young man has adventures in New York and points west before a final confrontation in, believe it or not, Arizona Territory. Laymon's basic premise is sound, as the real-life Ripper suddenly vanished; it's entirely possible that he just skipped town. However, the book's style, modeled after the adventure novels of Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain, is not a good marriage with the gruesome butcherings administered by the Ripper. Virtually every person Trevor encounters becomes a victim of the killer, setting up a revenge motif as the lad feels obligated to bring the wily Ripper to justice. Breathlessly, Laymon puts Trevor through a sexual encounter with an older woman, an initiation into a band of Wild West desperadoes, and other adventures worthy of a Huck Finn, always with the gory details of Ripper dismemberments hovering in the shadows. Savage is interesting, with its likable (and despicable) characters, but its folksy style coupled with sizable buckets of blood may be off-putting. Joe Collins

Customer Reviews

A classic adventure horror
Trevor Bentley appears at first to be a normal 15 year old boy, but there is a heroic side to him that becomes evident through out this book.
one rainy night he accidentally stumbles upon the infamous Jack the Ripper, and deciding that this may be the only chance any one gets to put a stop to his murderous rampage, he sets out to stop him, Unfortunately young Trev finds him self way out of his depth as he gets himself and a family held hostage by the Ripper on a boat set sail for The new world, America, Trevor manages to escape from the grasp of this legendary murderer, but not before they both find them selves in America.
This story is truly a great adventure, Starting in late 19th century London, to the new word America and then climaxes in the wild west, 3 very unique cultures that all existed at that time, add to this a story of love, friendship and self discovery and of coarse gruesome death in the way only Laymon can tell, and you have what is one of the greatest stories told

Laymon's legacy...
It's been over a year since Richard Laymon's passing and I just remembered what a great writer he was-- 'is' actually, he'll live on through his books!! I decided to pay my long overdue respects in the form of a review.

Let there be no doubt about it 'Savage' is Laymon at his peak!!
I read somewhere that Laymon wrote this book after his editor suggested he tried something different from his usual slasher/ splatterpunk fare. It's breathtaking to read this book and come to the conclusion he's done just that, but also has incorperated almost all of the usual elements that have made him such a winner (in my opinion anyway).

'Savage' is about Jack the Ripper, but it's not like you expect a serialkiller-novel to be. It's a fictional retelling and it also adds so much to the Ripper legend. It's told from the first person point of view and just the mix of Victorian English with Mark Twain-like American slang is worth the price of purchase alone. I won't spoil the plot, I'll just say the book is epic in scope and it heads for one of the most satisfing finales I have ever read. The way the Ripper ends up in the Old West, it's a classic!!

This is for all you knuckleheads out there who still suck their Stephen King books and worshipp their worn off copies of 'Lord of the Rings'. This is so good, maybe they'll call THIS literature in about a 100 years time!

full of black-humor, but its also a loveandcrime-story
I think its a great story, full of adventures, with an courageous hero (Bentley)and an horrifying devil(Ripper) I read this book about 6 times or more and like the lovescenes with generals daugther and the young cowgirl most...very erotic