Richard Laymon Interviews

LAYMON ON LAYMON: ISLAND

I've always wanted to take a crack at writing a book about people marooned on a tropical island. There are many classics on that subject, such as Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, Lord of the Flies. Here in the states, we have the legendary television comedy series, Gilligan's Island, in which a group of lovable goofballs "set sail on a three-hour tour," met a storm, and got stranded on an uninhabited island. And it seems that there have been countless motion pictures and television movies about marooned people.

I like to take a subject that has been around for a while and find a new way to handle it. The Stake was an offbeat angle on vampire stories. Resurrection Dreams took zombies in a fresh direction. Savage was a very unusual treatment of the Jack the Ripper story.

Island is my attempt at giving a new angle to the age-old stories of castaways. Instead of being marooned when a storm destroys their ship, my group is already ashore, picnicking on an island when their yacht blows up. Within a few hours after that, one of the castaways is found hanged.

I employed a fairly unusual technique in the writing of ISLAND. The whole story is actually told, as it occurs, by a young man, stranded with the others, who is keeping a journal. We see the entire adventure through his eyes, as he chooses to tell it.

What makes this different from the usual first-person narrative is that the writing of the journal becomes part of the story, and the writer of the journal is not aware of events until they happen.

Most first-person novels seem to have been written by a character at some indefinite point in the future, recounting his tale perhaps years after the events of the story occurred. We usually don't know what has prompted him to tell his story. The telling seems unrelated to the actual events in the story. And it is generally obvious, from the start, that the narrator survived to tell his tale.

Not so with ISLAND.

We know why Rupert is keeping the journal. We know when. We know where it is at all times. But we never know what may happen next -- or whether he will even be alive to finish the story.

Because he writes the journal as he goes along, anything can happen.

I had a great time exploring and experimenting with the possibilities of using the journal format. It opened up a lot of new ways to play with the story, new ways to surprise myself and my readers.

The technique may have been triggered by my own novel, Endless Night. In that story, a character named Simon uses tape recordings to keep a running account of his horrid activities. I was delighted, creating Simon's tapes, to discover how many strange arid nifty things are possible when the story is being told as it happens (or shortly afterward) by one of the characters.

In ISLAND, I took that technique pretty much to the limit.

LAYMON ON LAYMON: Experimental Fiction

LAYMON ON LAYMON: BLOOD GAMES

LAYMON ON LAYMON: Treasure Hunts

LAYMON ON LAYMON: FUNLAND

LAYMON ON LAYMON: Favorites

LAYMON ON LAYMON: MIDNIGHT'S LAIR

Although I've never walked into a British bookshop, if I did I'd most likely find, prominently displayed, a couple of dozen thick, well-designed, best selling paperbacks by an author with a last name that starts with a letter midway through the alphabet. Here in the US I'd be hard pressed to find any author of that description save for King and Koontz.

I'm not talking about any over-promoted hack pseudo-horror writer. This is an author who has been called "Stephen King without a conscience."..."In his books, blood doesn't so much drip, drip as explode, platter and coagulate."..."A gut-crunching writer who could maybe teach Bret Easton Ellis a thing or two about keeping the reader hooked on obnoxious characters who do horrible things."

Somehow the American publishing houses have done both this author, Richard Laymon, and the reading public an incredible disservice by not publishing, backing and promoting his work. He has at least eight novels not even available in US editions and is virtually unknown to many even hardcore horror addicts. This is a man with fans and fan clubs all over the world and who sells thousands of books in several languages. Evidently American publishers are, however, too busy putting glitzy covers on sheer crap and calling it horror to take note of Laymon and his body of brilliant work.

Laymon (like Stephen King) was born in 1947. His novel, THE CELLAR was published in 1980 by Warner books and made a splash -- over 400,000 copies sold, B. Dalton bestseller list for a month and has been republished in Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Bulgaria and is still in print in a new edition in Britain with rights purchased for publication in Turkey and Japan. As of January of this year he's added another 24 horror novels with another due out this year. THE STAKE, with horror writer protagonist Larry Dunbar, is often mentioned as a particular reader favorite and his books are selected time and time again for non-US book clubs.

Awards? FLESH was named Best Horror Novel of 1988 by Science Fiction Chronicle. The same book was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Outstanding Achievement in a Novel in 1989 along with Stinger by Robert R. McCammon, Black Wind by F. Paul Wilson, The Drive-In by Joe R. Lansdale, Queen Of The Damned by Anne Rice and the winner that year --The Silence Of The Lambs by Thomas Harris. FUNLAND was also nominated in 1991, the year Mine by Robert R. McCammon took the honor. A limited edition collection of short stories was nominated in 1994. Some guy named Ramsey Campbell beat him out that time.

His latest short fiction, "Herman," can be found (along with an excellent interview by Stanley Wiaters) in Cemetery Dance's Fall 1996 25th Anniversary Issue (the most recent.) It's straightforward, viscous, surprisely erotic and has something of a fairy tale feel to it. Yeah, all that.

I rarely offer bibliographies of featured writers here in the newsletter, but in Laymon's case it tells more about him than I can. Consider it a treasure map to the work of a writer you may have been missing far too long. Start tracking the gold and gems down.

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Richard Laymon

extract from Dark Dreamers - Conversations with the Masters of Horror
by Stanley Wiater

Visit theStanley Wiater homepage for more information

By this point, the reader is no doubt familiar with the popular buzzword regarding the "new wave" in horror -- the infamous splatter-punk. Some writers like the term, others who have been labeled with that name energetically reject it, while others whose work truly fits the description have never seen their name and that word used in the same review. A case in point: one dark dreamer who actually has written truly gory, sadistic, and blood-drenched tales, years before the term which perhaps best describes him came into its current usage.

The case in point is Richard Laymon.

Right from the start, with the publication in 1980 of a no-holds-barred chiller called The Cellar, Laymon has shown that he is not afraid to hit below the waist. Laymon writes in a style that leaves little to the imagination, and yet he deals with ordinary details and people in such a way that the reader almost always imagines an even worse fate for his terrified characters.

Born on January 14, 1947, in Chicago, Illinois, Laymon's family moved to southern California in the early sixties. He still lives in that state, but now with a family of his own. Like many writers, he has served time as both a librarian and a high school teacher. He has written in a variety of genres (Westerns, romances, juveniles, mysteries) under several pseudonyms. He has published some fifty stories, many of them for straight mystery magazines such as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. (I am also pleased to say that I obtained his services in this form as one-third of the lineup for Night Visions 7, which I edited in 1989.)

Horror, of course, has always been his primary interest, and remains the focus of nearly all his novels. In addition to The Cellar, they include The Woods Are Dark, Out Are the Lights, Night Show, All Hallow's Eve, Tread Softly, Flesh, Midnight's Lair, Beware, Resurrection Dreams, Funland, and The Stake. Several show a pronounced influence of a steady diet of horror movies, particularly the low-budget splatter variety.

In person, Laymon actually does remind one of a high school teacher, or more closely the stereotype of a quiet, pleasant, unassuming physical education coach. Like all the dark dreamers, he does not appear to be in any way as sadistic and warped as his imagination. An imagination which he will admit he keeps in check because his visions are so dark they often would be stomached only by the most hard-core horror fan. About the only way you can tell that Laymon enjoys his work is that he can't help grinning from ear to ear whenever he comes up with a particularly repulsive idea. Whatever buzzword you may give his style, Richard Laymon is a killer with words.



WIATER: I imagine your work has been rejected by more than a few editors who might otherwise be receptive to more "standard" horror fare?

LAYMON: I'm pretty sure that it has been [laughs]. I have a letter from a publisher which has its own horror line, and though the editor doesn't spell out exactly why she declined my work, says something to the effect, "In all good conscience it wouldn't be right for us to publish these novels." I also have a great rejection slip from a literary agent. The first time I ever sent out a novel -- one that's never been published, by the way -- I got back a letter from this old, established agency saying, "The book shows a lot of talent, and we wish you success with it elsewhere, but we found it was too sadistic in subject matter and don't think we could handle it." I framed that letter.

WIATER: The critical perception that you write stories with sadistic themes has been with you since the publication of your first novel. In Fangoria, for example, your early novels were praised for the way your characters often ended up drenched in blood. Which is leading to, do you think you deserve -- or do you even want -- to be thought of as a splatterpunk?

LAYMON: Speaking of Fangoria, there's a lot about the magazine in my novel Night Show. You might want to check that out. I did a lot of my research for the book by reading Fangoria. In fact, the magazine itself plays a key part in the plot, which deals with a special-effects makeup artist. But you asked about splatterpunks. Well, I don't like the "punk" part of it because you picture people with spiked hair and razor blades in their ears. Now, if you want to call it "rock 'n' roll horror," I might go along with that.

My real problem with some of the splatterpunks is that their main characters often seem to be the real punks. I don't think readers appreciate protagonists who are obnoxious assholes [chuckles]. Yet I certainly have no qualms against writers getting down and dirty. Or bloody and gory. Not if it's done well.

In spite of the way I feel about the so-called splatterpunks, I do sometimes resent it when I hear about them and I'm not mentioned. I was writing graphic, erotic horror novels when some of those guys were still in high school. But I really don't want to be identified with a group, anyway. Especially not that one.

WIATER: It would seem undeniable that you truly like to get "down and dirty" in your work. Do you ever restrict your imagination, or pre-censor yourself to give the story or novel a greater chance of acceptance with a publisher?

LAYMON: Oh, I've started restricting myself considerably.

WIATER: [taken aback] Why -- for what good reason?

LAYMON: It depends on the market. I did pull out all the stops when I wrote my story for the anthology Book of the Dead. But I think this a factor that horror writers have to deal with: If you want to try for major success, you can't be too far out. To have that "blockbuster mainstream" novel, you have to temper the nastiness, gore, sex, sadism -- all that fun stuff [laughs]!

(Copyright 1990 by Stanley Wiater. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted with Permission.)

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The Mystery Scene Interview with Richard Laymon - July/Aug 1995 by Ed Gorman

GORMAN: Tell us about Quake, which is now available over here.

LAYMON: An excellent description of Quake was provided in the British periodical Time Out. The reviewer wrote, "LA is hit by the big one, but instead of giving us a standard disaster scenario, Laymon sets up a wicked female-in-peril situation as the earthquake provides a perfect opportunity for pervy Stanley to get his hands on a woman trapped in the ruins of her home. In the aftershock chaos, can her blinded husband and daughter reach the house before she is attacked? There's enough cat-and-mouse suspense here to leave your nails in shreds." (By the way, the daughter isn't blinded -- R.L.)

A reviewer for the Manchester Evening News wrote, "It's a catalogue of horrors that makes Nightmare on Elm Street look as cosy as Coronation Street."

Quake was inspired by my own earthquake experiences. I've been in three large earthquakes (and too many smaller ones to count), but the idea for Quake came to me in the wake of the Whittier shaker of 1987. When it hit, I was alone in a second-story law office in Glendale, not far from the epicenter. I was also about thirty miles from my home in west Los Angeles. After the quake ended, my only concern was getting home to my wife and daughter. Not knowing the extent of the damage, I was terrified for their safety.

I took that experience, magnified the size of the quake, created a bunch of characters, threw in my perceptions of modern Los Angeles civilization (or lack thereof), and presented my own version of how things might be for a family trying to survive -- and save each other -- after a major quake has broken down not only the walls of the city, but the rules of decent behavior.

In other words, LAPD is shut down and people are left to fend for themselves.

This book was nearly finished when the big quake hit us on January 17, 1994. The manuscript, a stack of about 500 loose pages, was sitting on a wobbly TV tray in my home office. Our chimney separated itself from the house, bookshelves toppled, televisions hit the floor, the refrigerator and stove marched across the kitchen, cupboards emptied themselves onto floors, a window broke, walls cracked, our fireplace collapsed...and after it was all over, I discovered the loose manuscript pages of Quake still neatly stacked on the wobbly TV tray as if nothing had happened.

GORMAN: Quake has all the virtues and none of the vices of too many bestsellers. Big cast, big theme, yet it keeps the voice and viewpoint that make all your books so solid. Were you aiming for a larger audience?

LAYMON: Was I aiming for a larger audience? Not consciously. For the most part, I was just trying to write a book that would please myself, my agent and editor, my friends, and my fans.

In the United Kingdom, all my books have a large audience. Over here, however, none of them since The Cellar has been given enough distribution to have a chance at a large audience.

So, in a way, there seems to be no point in "aiming for a larger audience." There is a vast potential audience in this country for plenty of writers, including you and me, but the audience isn't likely to notice any book that isn't given a large push, at the outset, by a publisher with clout. If it doesn't get The Big Push, it'll die on the shelves, mostly unseen and unbought.

My book Savage seemed like a novel with fairly large sales potential. It's a very unusual book, sort of about an English Huck Finn hunting down Jack the Ripper in the American West, told from the boy's point of view in a brand new language that mixes British idiom and old American slang. I figured Savage should appeal to mystery fans, western readers, horror fans, plus anyone who enjoys a large, mainstream adventure novel. Add all the Jack the Ripper buffs, and the thing could've been a smash.

But it got little or no publicity, a small printing, and very little distribution. In effect, the hordes of people I envisioned falling in love with my book never had a chance to know it exists.

The same goes (to a lesser degree) for The Stake, which I figured had a lot going for it. As vampire novels go, The Stake seemed to have huge mainstream potential.

But it didn't get the Push.

So...I might as well have written a trite little genre potboiler, for all the difference it made in terms of distribution and sales in the U.S.

Those experiences have given me the idea that "aiming for a larger audience" is a waste of time. No book, no matter how good, has a chance of reaching a large audience unless the publisher SEES the book's value.

Which makes a nice segue into the next subject. As opposed to what happened in the U.S., The Stake and Savage both did extremely well in Great Britain. (And continue to sell over there, since my entire backlist is in print in the U.K) The first U.K. printing of Savage went so fast that it's now a collector's item here in the States. I've heard of people selling copies for $175.00.

GORMAN: Can you explain why you're now a major name in England but aren't nearly as well known in your home country over here?

LAYMON: My agent, Bob Tanner, had a lot to do with it. He helped me find publishers who live my stuff and know how to sell it.

Here, we've never had such luck.

My British publisher once told me, " We don't publish books, we publish authors."

In that one sentence is the heart of the difference.

The author, here, is generally treated like crap. I know of one U.S. editor who said, "Why should I give Laymon $10,000 for a book when I can pull Joe Blow off the street and pay him $2,000?"

Cute, huh?

Do I sound a little annoyed?

I am. I shouldn't be angry for myself, though. Thanks to England and all the REST of the world, I make an excellent living as a writer. But I resent that, because of what I see as the stupidity of many American editors, there are great numbers of people in the U.S. who are missing out on my books. (Even my American fans resent it. They have to spend twice as much money, or more, because so much of my work is only available in British editions.)

The real shame, however, is that bunches of American writers have to depend for their livelihoods on American publishers.

Plenty of U.S. publishers pay $2,000 to $5,000 for a novel. Very few writers can get more than $10,000 - $15,000 for a single book. Which means that most writers are paid so miserably by American publishers that they would need to write four or five books a year (if not ten) to even reach the poverty level established by the U.S. government.

If that isn't enough of a disgrace, few actually PAY the money on time. They have to be brow-beaten before they'll put a check in the mail -- and THEN many U.S. literary agents will keep the check for a few MORE months, apparently using it to cover gambling losses, or God knows what.

Which may all sound like wild exaggerations -- except to those of your readers who are writers. I don't know a single pro who hasn't been shafted time and again by U.S. publishers. I also know quite a few writers who've noticed how wonderful, by comparison, the British publishers are.

For a writer, being published by a company such as Headline in England is like "dying and going to heaven." Also not an exaggeration. I have letters from a few writers who've used that actual expression.

A bit more than you probably bargained for, Ed, when you asked me that one.

GORMAN: You seem to have started out as more of a mystery-crime writer than anything else.

LAYMON: My first sale was to Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. I subsequently sold several stories to EQMM, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, and Mike Shayne's Mystery Magazine. This was back in the 1970's. There were no good markets for short horror stories (other than a couple of men's magazines) so I concentrated on the mystery magazines. They were each buying more than a dozen new stories every month.

My stories from that period were reprinted in my collection A Good, Secret Place. Though these early stories were published in "mystery" magazines, readers will probably find them to be a trifle quirky. Many of the stories contain elements of the grotesque and bizarre. I pushed things about as far as I could within the rather straight-laced boundaries of those magazines.

Once I moved on to writing horror stories for anthologies in the 1980's, my short fiction became a lot more liberated. I was able to write stories that have the same "voice" as my novels.

As an aside, I do think that there is a lot of overlap between crime fiction and horror fiction. The Silence of the Lambs is the example everyone cites. But l think it would be difficult to find a noir or hard-boiled crime novel that doesn't have elements of horror. Of course, I see horror everywhere. I think Lonesome Dove is a horror novel. (And it was part of my inspiration for writing Savage.)

GORMAN: You seem to fit most comfortably in the category of "dark suspense" - crime fiction that is not a who-dunit, horrific fiction without a supernatural element. Is that a fair description?

LAYMON: Pretty fair. Thinking about the subject, I find that I seem to be writing three different kinds of novels. One batch has strong supernatural elements: The Cellar, Beware!, Beast House, Resurrection Dreams, One Rainy Night, Flesh, and Darkness, Tell Us. Others tread a middle ground in which the supernatural is down played or merely hinted at: Tread Softly, Funland, Blood Games, The Stake, In the Dark. But quite a few of them are straight, realistic, dark suspense novels without any supernatural whatsoever: Out Are the Lights, Allhallow's Eve, Night Show, Alarms, Midnight's Lair, Savage, Endless Night, Quake, and my forthcoming Island.

Even when the supernatural does rear its head in my books, it is usually more of a catalyst -- a device to trigger the conflict -- than a major focus of the story.

I don't worry much about whether or not one of my stories contains elements of the supernatural. If I come up with what I think is a nifty concept, I'll give it a whirl.

With or without elements of the supernatural, all my books end up containing pretty much the same blend of other elements -- what you define as a "Richard Laymon World" in a later question.

GORMAN: Following your first bestseller, The Cellar, you went through some rough times, right?

LAYMON: Right. Here in the States, my career has never recovered. The Cellar, sold well over 200,000 copies and ended up on the B. Dalton bestseller list for a month.

But my second book, The Woods Are Dark, flopped. That flop ruined me here. They dumped me like a bad meal. Nobody here would touch my stuff for several years. At one point, a major editor at Berkley was all set to make an offer for two or three of my books, but the deal went south when their sales people checked with my former publisher. As recently as a couple of years ago, a possible sale to another publisher was killed because of what had happened at the old publisher more than a decade earlier; one of their people was working at the old publisher at the time The Woods are Dark didn't sell up to expectations.

The bright side of my career in the U.S. aside from my fans, my reputation, and the collectors, is that I've found a pretty good home, for now, with Thomas Dunne at St. Martin's Press. So far, I haven't gotten much of a push there -- but they are publishing my books regularly in hardbound, and the books are finding their way into the stores.

In fact, the St. Martin's hardbounds turn up in larger quantities, for the most part, than my paperbacks.

My association with Thomas Dunne and St. Martin's is the best relationship I've ever had with a U.S. publisher. I'm still waiting, however, for a U.S. publisher to decide one of my books is worth "getting behind."

GORMAN: You're one of only a few writers, including Dean Koontz, who use humor to enhance the terror in your books. Most writers seem afraid to try that.

LAYMON: Ed, please. That stuff wasn't supposed to be funny.

The deal is, I like it when a book makes me smile or laugh. I like it when people make me laugh.

My feeling about fiction, regardless of the genre, is that it is meant to be a representation of life. I want my books to give a whole spectrum of experiences to my readers. Not just fear or terror or revulsion, but excitement, laughter, pain, sorrow, desire, etc.

Most of all, I like to surprise them.

GORMAN: There's now a "Richard Laymon World" a literary theme park: white middle-class people who struggle, and sometimes perish, in a world so violent they can no longer comprehend it. There are great moments of humor, of tenderness, of sex, but there is almost never any respite from the sense of dread they all seem to feel. Is that a fair description?

LAYMON: I would add that in my "World," people are very often the authors of their own destruction. They may fall victim to temptation -- or make a simple, grave mistake.

"For want of a nail, the shoe was lost..." is a big part of my fictional world.

Somebody gets careless.

Another aspect of my World: the bad stuff is generally perpetrated by people who are evil -- not misunderstood.

And my protagonists meet evil with violence.

Usually the cops aren't around, so normal, everyday citizens have to defend themselves or perish.

When I do have cops in my novels, they are always the good guys. They are the "thin blue line" that guards the gates of civilization against the barbarians.

A major theme underlying Quake is this: look what happens when the LAPD is put out of action. Chaos. We got a very small taste of it back in 1992, and Quake shows the possible results on a much larger scale.

GORMAN: Describe your average working day.

LAYMON: My average working day hit the skids when I started to watch the O.J. Simpson trial.

Normally, however, I get up and read for an hour or so. I'll write from about 8:30 to 11:30 a.m., then have lunch, watch some news on TV, maybe read for a while and/or take a brief nap. Then I'll return to my word processor at about 1:00 and continue writing until 3:00 or 4:00 p.m. Then I'll quit for the day, read, and drink a couple of beers before dinner.

It's a pretty loose schedule.

I might take a day off in the middle of the week and go to a movie or a mall.

I'll usually work at least one full day each weekend.

My main goal is to write at least 30 pages per week on my novel. I'm very pleased when I go over 30, and delighted when I hit 50.

The main thing that messes up my schedule is travel. I generally spend about eight weeks per year away from home on various trips. They're great for research, but they sure do interrupt my writing.

The great quantity of free time -- and freedom in general -- is one of the wonderful perks of being a writer.

GORMAN: What are you working on presently? Do you see any big changes coming in your career?

LAYMON: My next novel, to be published by Headline in June, is Island. It's a contemporary suspense/adventure story in which a small group of people on a yachting trip gets marooned on an uninhabited tropical island.

It was inspired by Gilligan.

The most unusual feature of Island is that the entire novel consists of journal entries made by one of the cast- aways.

He got marooned with lots of paper. I'm joking, but not lying. People will need to read the book if they want to see how the guy found the time and supplies to write such an extensive journal.

Big changes in my career? I'm not planning on any major new directions in my writing. Things are obviously changing, though. I seem to grow more willing, all the time, to take big chances with my fiction. My philosophy is, "go for it." If I blow it, I blow it. But I'd rather take a big risk, and fail, than find myself writing the same book again and again, just to be safe.

I'm actually allowed to feel that way because I know that Headline and my readers are on my side, rooting for me, and eager for more.

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