Midnight's Lair

Midnight's Lair is a 1988 horror novel by Richard Laymon, originally written under the pseudonym Richard Kelly. It was first published in Great Britain and was not released in the United States until 1993, where it was distributed by St. Martin's Press.

Plot

The novel concerns a group of tourists who become trapped in an underground cavern after a fire destroys the exits. Darcy, one of the tour guides, takes a small group to try to escape by breaking into a portion of the cave that had been walled up years before. Among the tourists is Kyle Mordock, son of the hotel owner who has a perverse obsession with Darcy. When Darcy and a small group of tourists attempt to breach the wall they accidentally release a family of cannibalistic savages that has been secretly living in the cave for over half a century. These people are the descendants of people who had been imprisoned in the cave by Kyle's great-grandfather and kept alive long enough to spawn a whole tribe by being fed the corpses of women Kyle and his father had kidnapped, raped and murdered. Subplots include Darcy falling in love with one of the tourists, Kyle gaining the trust of a teenage girl with sinister intent and Darcy's mother venturing underground with a ragtag rescue team.