Flesh by Richard Laymon

Flesh
by Richard Laymon
1987 WH Allen

An eel or something crawls into people's backs and turns them into bloodthirsty killers.  A thin pretext for a string of killings, but mainly the book is about a college student constantly breaking up and getting back together with her boyfriend.

Actually, since this is Richard Laymon, most of the book is people taking showers and deciding what clothes to wear.  I barely managed to make it through this one, and only by skimming through pages upon pages of showers and picking out socks.

We have a Sheriff's deputy who instantly accepts the premise of a kill-spree inducing parasite when he isn't killing pages in an irrelevant child custody subplot.  The college student has her roommates get killed off by a possessed horror nerd loser (little close to the bone there, Laymon) while she agonizes over whether her horny boyfriend is only interested in sex.

The killings seemed a bit sparse and tame for a Laymon book.  I really need to start at the beginning with Laymon and work my way up - the hefty page counts starting in the late 80s didn't do him any favors.

Things I Didn't Finish - Bite by Richard Laymon

Bite
by Richard Laymon
1996

Not sure why I picked this one up.  After witnessing his steady decline with the Beast House chronicles, I figured his early stuff was his best.  As time went on, the gory madness went down and the interminable interior monologues and obsessions with tedious admin went up.  1991's One Rainy Night was tolerable (albeit with overlong clothes changing scenes), but sometimes I think I'm still reading the posthumous 2005 Glory Bus.

A guy answers the door to find his ex-girlfriend and one true love in a bathrobe.  She asks him to kill a vampire.  He does, which starts the most tedious body disposal scene since Pulp Fiction.  Laymon's obsession with intimately detailed changing scenes turns up again, as characters spend page upon page worrying about what clothes to wear before, during, and after the killing.

Looking at plot synopses later it looks like I dodged a bullet.  The entire novel is about disposing of that stupid body, like if The Trouble With Harry crossbred with 90s psycho road trip.

I'll have to go back to his analog stuff and work my way forward.

Richard Laymon - One Rainy Night

One Rainy Night
by Richard Laymon
1991 Headline

Black rain makes the residents of a small town go crazy and rape and kill each other.  That's it.  Like you need anything more.

Laymon keeps things moving here and just switches scenes when things start to run aground.  There are several sets of survivors - a babysitter and her charge, parents in a restaurant, a cop and two citizens, and some rapey teenage boys.

Laymon doesn't get too hung up on the causes or the "rules" like a lot of these things do, though he does get wrapped up in admin at times.  There are several scenes of survivors changing into scavenged clothes, and every single article is described in detail.

Also present is his creepy juvenile sexuality, with characters being distracted by boobs in the middle of a massacre.

Luckily the internal monologues are mostly absent, and Laymon actually manages some suspenseful moments.

Author Overview - Richard Laymon

Richard Laymon began his horror career with 1980s The Cellar and produced some 50 novels and tons of short stories before his untimely death in 2001.  I'd only heard of him relatively recently - for some reason he missed his place with other 80s horror paperback greats, though he reportedly found more success in England than in his native US.

His books are known for their over the top sex and violence, but it's the way he does it that stands out.  While other authors seem to relish pushing or crossing boundaries like a rebellious child, with Laymon it's more like he innocently didn't know these boundaries existed.  Like he didn't know you're supposed to have the child rape happen off page, or that it's silly to have the women fleeing said child rapist hook up with a hit man at a house where monster's live.

This is a good thing.  There's all the gore and depravity of your typical splatterpunk outing, but it's more matter of fact than in your face.

This is Laymon at his best.  At his worst, there are hundreds of pages of padded out interior monologues of annoying people.  The characters are supposed to be annoying, or petty, or in frustrating situations, but he just goes on and on.  This seems to get worse further down his career, if the trajectory of his Beast House Chronicles is any indication.  By the last installment, there is hundred pages of a guy wanting to ditch his girlfriend and ask out a tour guide for every one page of monster penis biting (that's a monster with a penis that bites, not a monster that bites penises).

With the monologues comes another Laymon standby - juvenile sexuality.  A lot of voyeurism and copping sneaky feels, not so much actual doing it.  This is perfectly at home in this setting, and supports his atmosphere of being innocent and depraved at the same time.

More at Richard Laymon Kills

Glory Bus by Richard Laymon

Glory Bus aka Into the Fire
by Richard Laymon
2005 Headline, as Into the Fire by Leisure Books

Laymon does a killer road trip novel, like all those movies in the 90s (Wild at Heart, Thelma and Louise, California, etc).  It's a sleazy fifty page novella of nasty characters doing nasty things.  Unfortunately, that novella is over 400 pages long, almost all of it that Laymon trademark - repetitive internal monologues of annoying people.

A college student picks up two separate murderous hitchhikers on the same day, and the three of them go on a rampage across the country.  Rampage may be a little strong of a word - they run over a couple cops and stab a couple people while stealing their cars.  There's also a weird bit where they stay at a hotel run by the cast of a canceled medical TV drama.  The page count would have been better served with more of these set pieces - if you actually outlined the plot, there's not a lot going on.