Richard Laymon wrote a lot of books, and I am sure I have read more than half of them. I have my favourites for sure, and choosing a top five is impossible so here is a Top Six… plus another one. Everyone has their darlings, and you’ll not be surprised by a few usual suspects; Island, The Woods are Dark, and Cuts.
These may be some people’s less cherished picks too. There is no accounting for taste and for certain, tastes can change. Since I am embarking on this slow reread of my ‘darlings’ I thought we could take stock here and now of the top six and once I have read every Laymon on my shelf, come back and see if the lists still match. So far so good!
Do you have a number one or top three Richard Laymon books? (and why is it Island?) I am sure Savage ranks quite high and I have hopes of it entering the race soon!
The ranking so far: https://tiermaker.com/create/lydias-books-richard-laymon-18721311
Here are some quotes from a few places, but mostly from A Writer’s Tale, by Richard Laymon from Deadline Press in 1998… I am hoping this will be reprinted soon.
“My whole family was active in Scouting. We often went camping in the woods. Nearly every summer, we drove to Wisconsin where we stayed in a cabin, went boating, fishing and swimming. I have great memories of those times, and much of my fiction takes place in areas similar to the places where we had such summer adventures.”
The Woods Are Dark (1981)
“(One Canadian book dealer recommends The Woods Are Dark and offers a money-back guarantee for any reader who is disappointed in it. So far, nobody has returned a copy.) This would be the Headline or Author’s Preferred versions… At Warner, “Apparently, an editor hadn’t appreciated my terse style, so he or she had “fixed” it for me. Fixed it, all right. Sentences strung together by this imbecile no longer made sense. Entire paragraphs were removed. Time sequences were distorted. Changes in punctuation created grammatical errors. In several places, the pronoun “she” was replaced by a character’s name—the wrong character. The same once-thrown knife got picked up twice. A fight got moved by accident to a different and impossible location. I can’t begin to describe how badly the novel had been decimated. I was so overwhelmed and frustrated that, at one point, I actually broke down in tears.”
He provided edits, only half were made. The cover art that he loved was removed and “My career in the U.S. has never recovered from the damage done by the Warner edition of The Woods Are Dark.”
Out Are the Lights (1982)
“Trying to develop Out Are The Lights, I had nothing more than a book about a movie theater showing snuff films—until I realized the potential of making my main character deaf. Moby Dick was probably a pretty ho-hum idea for a book until Melville decided to take away one of Ahab’s legs. My suggestion to get past the block: ask yourself how the story might go if you made it happen to someone else. Play with the ages of your characters, their genders, their careers, special interests, etc. You may stumble onto a notion that will suddenly bring your story to life—and blast away your writer’s block.”
Warner books fucks him over again…
“On the back of the cover, readers are provided with a rare opportunity to find out every major plot trick in the book. Out Are the Lights is built around a couple of major gimmicks, which are supposed to remain secret until discovered by the reader. Anyone who reads the back cover, however, learns every secret—including the final one, which is revealed about six pages from the end of the book. This was a case of being stabbed in the back cover. It would be rather as if the producers of The Usual Suspects had revealed the identity of Keyser Soze in the posters and prevues of the film. How could a publisher be so stupid?”
Dark Mountain / Tread Softly (1987)
“The writing of this book marked a new stage in my career. Largely due to the influences of Dean Koontz, I’d decided to “mainstream” my horror novels. He’d not only advised such a step personally, but he’d given detailed advice on how to go about it in his book, How to Write Best-Selling Fiction. Taking his suggestions to heart, I was determined to enlarge the scope of my material so that my next book would be more than simply a “horror genre” novel. Before Tread Softly, my horror novels were short and to the point. They never lingered. They never elaborated. The scenes shot by rapid-fire, with a breathless pace that never paused for a description, rarely for an explanation. The stories raced along non-stop from start to finish.
“In Dean’s opinion, I insisted on the slam-bang pace because I lacked confidence in my ability to hold the readers’ interest. I was afraid I might bore them if I didn’t plunge from one wild, over-the-top scene to the next. He was right, of course. On my way toward getting a high school diploma, a B.A. in English and an M.A. in English literature, I’d been forced to read huge amounts of fiction. Much of it “was great, exciting stuff. But much of it had bored me. From a very early age, I was a rebel against boring fiction. I equated “boring” with lengthy descriptive passages and with scenes in which nothing much seemed to happen. I always wanted the writer to ‘get on with it.’ Therefore I was determined, in my own fiction, to avoid any writing that didn’t move the story forward at a good, quick clip.”
Island (1991)
“The project was instigated by a couple of film guys. They had an elaborate plan to make the book into a huge bestseller and blockbuster film. I was to ghost-write the book and keep mum about my participation in it.” [Maybe Island?]
“Unfortunately, their detailed plot outline was pretty much ludicrous and they refused to let me fix it very much. the decision eventually came in against the Swiss Army knife. Stuck into the palm tree on the cover of my book would be a straight razor. Here’s the thing. As mentioned early, I was still in the process of writing Island. And I now knew that a straight razor would appear prominently on the cover. So I beefed up the role of the razor. And the book was better for it. That razor… Ooo, the places it went, the things it did! All because of some decisions about what to put on the cover.
“In writing Island, I let the story develop in its own way and I mostly just followed along to see what would happen next. But I helped it along, too. I was MOG. My game was to keep things moving along at a quick pace and to see how far I could go. I pretty much pushed the situation and the format to its limits. And on the final page of my manuscript, 594, I tossed a hand grenade (figuratively) into the works. As for the ending, I didn’t know I’d do it till I did it. I knew I might, but it was almost as if I left the final decision up to Rupert.”
In the Dark (1994)
“Though the basic idea of the plot seemed fairly simple, I saw that it had some real potential. It was exactly what I wanted. An adventure story. A treasure hunt. A deep mystery. And plenty of room for suspense, scares, and horror. Also, it was “infinitely expandable.” There was no built-in limit to the number of adventures Jane might experience. So I would have no trouble writing my minimum 600 pages.
“Not only could I expand the story to my heart’s content, but it had an “open” format. MOG could send Jane just about anywhere. The possibilities -were staggering.”
Cuts (1999)
Unrelated, maybe: “For example, look at all the books and movies in which a gal gets snatched by a serial killer. In how many of them is she immediately stripped down to her bare skin? Very few. But that’s what would happen in almost every case in real life, and everybody knows it. That’s what bad guys do when they grab gals. It’s not nice, but it’s true.”
“My purpose is to write truly. In doing so, I try to have people behave the way real people behave, not the way people behave in most bestsellers and mainstream movies. My male characters—even the good guys—are usually fairly horny and voyeuristic. Sometimes, so are my gals. If a man or woman gets into a fight, he or she might get some clothing torn. If people are injured, they remove clothing in order to bandage wounds. We don’t necessarily leave the room or look the other way when they change clothes, bathe, have sex, or use the toilet.” – from Biting Remarks: A Candid Conversation With Richard Laymon By Gregory Nicoll, 1999
Night in the Lonesome October (2001)
Published posthumously. He went to a lot of schools. USC, UCLA, Lyola; “Upon being graduated from Redwood, I headed north for Willamette University in Salem, Oregon to begin my days as a college student. Willamette is the inspiration for the fictional university, Belmore, which appears in some of my novels. I majored in English, wrote a lot, and had stories and poetry published in the university literary magazine.”
He was a morning walker – around 9 a.m. usually, apparently, but he spent nights at the Culver City Theatre…
“The place had real atmosphere. And it had colorful patrons. Some were certainly devoted film and horror fans, like myself. Others seemed a bit shady. I sat by myself, never spoke to anyone, and usually felt creepy about the whole experience.
“Which added to the flavor of the films, no doubt. After watching movies like Halloween or Prom Night or any of a hundred others, I always had to leave the theater alone and “walk through the empty streets to reach my car. If the movie’d been good enough, the walk back to my car could be harrowing. I not only had to worry about real thugs, but about the likes of Mrs. Vorhees or Michael Meyers coming after me. I know, I know. They don’t really exist. I knew they couldn’t get me, but the power of certain movies set me on edge. I’d hurry down empty sidewalks (and an especially creepy passageway alongside the theater), glancing over my shoulder, goosebumps often skittering up my spine. At the car, I’d always be careful to check the back seat before climbing in. Then I’d lock the doors. And on the short drive home, I always worried that I might arrive home and find that someone had butchered Ann and Kelly in my absence. A grown man. Hey, I was in my early thirties at the time. But frequently spooked.”
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Night in the Lonesome October review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tW5fFEoZW6c
Island review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKzVWA3_pUs&t=3s
Cuts review:
https://typicalbooks.com/cuts-by-richard-laymon
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I talk horror books; extreme horror, classic, slasher, gothic, and everything in between. Helping you find the next best horror book to read is the goal, and sharing new and old horror from my shelves and new releases is how! Horror, nonfiction and even true crime can be found here as I find that human beings are the scariest thing of all.
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