Richard Laymon is one of the most controversial authors in the horror genre. I don’t see him discussed so much anymore, but at one time his work was hotly debated.
Many called Laymon one of the greatest writers we had. Others derided him as a hack and a sexist. Me, I think it’s just as ludicrous to cite Richard Laymon as one of the best as it is to claim he was a bad writer. He knew how to pace a novel, and his plots are always complicated and surprising. Laymon spent time developing his characters before he threw them into the maelstrom.
Richard Laymon’s debut is The Cellar, a novel that broke taboos and shocked readers. The Cellar came out in 1980, the same year Jack Ketchum unleashed his own debut, Off Season. These two novels raised horror to new limits that had just been hinted at by writers like James Herbert and Stephen King.
I liked The Cellar and its sequel, The Beast House. I also enjoyed one called Tread Softly. After that Richard Laymon books became hard to find in his native America. He did healthy business in England. It was years before I had an opportunity to read him again.
In the late nineties I began ordering books through the mail, and I decided it was time to read Richard Laymon again. I started with Bite, which I obtained from The Overlook Connection.
Soon after, thanks to Cemetery Dance Publications and Leisure Books, Laymon began to become available again in the States.
The first Leisure title was Bite. Just my luck, the one I had already read. I needn’t have worried. Nearly every one of his many books were to come, and this time in readily available, affordable editions. I bought and read them all, and I never once had a bad time.
I was well aware I wasn’t reading Peter Straub or Ramsey Campbell when I picked up a Laymon title. His books are thrill rides. Richard Laymon pulled few punches in his writing career, but his stories are never merely blood and guts grossout fiction.
Bite was my re-entry point to the work of Richard Laymon, and I thought it would be a good one to embark on my trip back through his entire body of work.
Despite a lot of violence and intense situations, Bite is really a subtle piece. It’s, at least on the surface, a vampire novel, but does it really feature a supernatural creature? That’s for you to figure out when you read the book.
On the surface, accusations of sexist situations are apt in Bite. During dire life or death scenarios the male narrator continually checks out the lead female’s body. Sad to say, that’s how a lot of young guys think. To Laymon’s credit the woman is tough and resourceful. Much more so than the man. She’s the strong one and he is a boob with his mind more on her breasts than their gruesome predicament. A likeable boob, but one nonetheless.
Despite a breakneck plot, Bite does bog down a little here and there. The endless would-be clever banter between the man and the woman began to grate on me. I think a judicious twenty-or-so page edit would have made Bite a tighter and more urgent read. The final fifty pages are worth the patience. It’s a hell of a conclusion that leaves readers guessing and thinking.
Richard Laymon passed away, suddenly and shockingly, on February 14th, 2001. Valentine’s Day, which is apt, because he was loved by his fans and his peers. I was new to the world of organized horror fiction fandom and the message boards were abuzz about his death. We all hoped it was a nasty rumor, as sometimes occurs on the internet. No, it was true.
Sadly, his work was growing in maturity, and we can only guess what was to come in the future. The last two books published in Laymon’s lifetime, The Traveling Vampire Show and Night in the Lonesome October are smart, sensitive, and well-written enough to quell all but his staunchest critics.
He’s gone, but we have a large number of books to access and re-access. The new extreme readers and writers should read them all to see the juggernaut that blazed the trail for them to follow.
Mark Sieber learned to love horror with Universal, Hammer, and AIP movies, a Scholastic edition of Poe’s Eight Tales of Terror, Sir Graves Ghastly Presents, The Twilight Zone, Shirley Jackson’s The Daemon Lover, The Night Stalker, and a hundred other dark influences. He came into his own in the great horror boom of the 1980’s, reading Charles L. Grant, F. Paul Wilson, Ray Russell, Skipp and Spector, David J. Schow, Stephen King, and countless others. Meanwhile he spent as many hours as possible at drive-in theaters, watching slasher sequels, horror comedies, monster movies, and every other imaginable type of exploitation movie. When the VHS revolution hit, he discovered the joys of Italian and other international horror gems. Trends come and go, but he still enjoys having the living crap scared out of him. Cemetery Dance has published his nonfiction collections He Who Types Between the Rows: A Decade of Horror Drive-In and He Who Types Between the Rows 2: Horror Drive-In Will Never Die. He can be reached at [email protected], and at www.horrordrive-in.com.
