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Post by daemonia on Jun 25, 2009 14:24:19 GMT
I got hold of this recently thanks to another member here and just finished up with it. I've long been a fan of Laymon, ever since reading Endless Night which both gripped me and sent a shiver up my spine (no easy feat!) - loved it.
Beware! is a very early Laymon novel, originally published by NEL in the mid 80's and is everything Verhoeven's Hollow Man should've been - dealing as it does with a malevolent central character who is invisible. It also takes in black magic, conspiracy theories and rape and murder aplenty along the way. It's pretty crudely written, even for Laymon, but I had a fantastic time with it. It's fast-paced, violent and all in the worst possible taste, just how I like 'em.
No masterpiece then, but a real antidote after finding Koontz's Tick Tock a bit of a bore. It's not a book I'd offer to radical feminists either, being chock full of sexual violence and female objectification!
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Post by vaughan on Jun 25, 2009 15:27:16 GMT
I have this one, but after a couple of Laymon titles I decided to spread out my reading a bit. I look forward to reading it. After my extensive experience with him (I've read TWO books  ) I must admit I have found bits and pieces of his more sexual text squirm inducing. For instance, 'Allhallow's Eve' spends time - more than once - describing erections from 13 year old boys, and then tells us what they'd like to be doing with their classmates and teachers..... It totally works for shock factor, but doesn't move the story along! |
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Post by dem bones on Jun 25, 2009 16:28:07 GMT
I must admit I have found bits and pieces of his more sexual text squirm inducing. For instance, 'Allhallow's Eve' spends time - more than once - describing erections from 13 year old boys, and then tells us what they'd like to be doing with their classmates and teachers..... It totally works for shock factor, but doesn't move the story along! He goes in for these interludes on a very regular basis, with his 'heroes' often more guilty of perving than the cannibal rapist serial-killer who's threatening them. And girls in red gym shorts. If you've not met any yet, you sure will! I reckon you're wise to take a break between Laymon novels and read something else, as he doesn't really vary the approach. Savage, the adventures of Jack The Ripper in the US, is maybe his only departure for the formula and even that one has its 'Laymon moments'. Welcome to Vault, daemonia. Hope you have fun on here. "fast-paced, violent and all in the worst possible taste, just how I like 'em" suggests you'll get on with plenty of us just fine. |
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Post by daemonia on Jun 25, 2009 22:03:21 GMT
Thanks for the welcome - although I'm not really new here, just haven't posted much, in spite of being a member for a couple of years now! But I'll soon put that right.  I agree, though - I make it a personal rule never to read two Laymon's in a row, that would probably get repetitive! So I followed this up with Guy N. Smith's The Sucking Pit. I'll post elsewhere about that one. Laymon does (or, rather, did) seem to revel in the more perverse nature of his characters. As Vaughan pointed out, All Hallow's Eve really does have some borderline stuff in there - luckily, I'm not easily offended, so I just enjoy the ride.  |
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Post by dem bones on Mar 23, 2014 20:48:35 GMT
Richard Laymon - Beware! (NEL, 1985)  Steve CrispBlurb: The supermarket was still open, brightly lit. She, looked along the deserted centre aisle. To her left soup, chili beans. To the right: biscuits. Facing her the refrigerated meat counter: steaks, chops, spare ribs .....
And, wrapped, stating sightless, a woman's head
Even as she screamed, she heard another sound: a whimpering moan. Lying on the blood-pooled floor: a man, clutching feebly, one-handed, at the stump of his other arm.
Terror-shocked, she turned to run, was hit from behind, brought crashing down, skidding along the reddened, slippery floor, rough hands clutching, gripping her body ... Richard Laymon specialised in voyeurs, so it was only a matter of time before he came up with an invisible Peeping Tom with several anti-social tendencies At first it seems as though Hoffman's Market, Oasis, Arizona. is haunted by a very angry ghost with a taste for T-bone steaks and fine wine, but that's before the meat cleaver massacre which leaves poor Elsie Hoffman decapitated, a local barman butchered and our gutsy, resourceful heroine, Lacey Allen, raped by person or persons invisible. Lacey, twenty-nine, is a reporter on local newspaper The Oasis Tribune, and the phantom fiend has taken quite a shine to her. So much so that he follows her home and brutalises her all over again. Contemporaneous with this, at Bayou Lefourche, New Orleans, action man Matthew Dukane risks life and limb to infiltrate an al-fresco voodoo orgy (orgy being the operative word) and liberate young Alice Donovan from the clutches of Laveda, the beautiful, charismatic and exceptionally evil High Priestess. Alice, nineteen, is far from overjoyed at her rescue and warns Dukane that Laveda's mob will kill both him and glamorous Dr. Terri Milner (hired by Alice's parents to deprogramme her), and do so very slowly ..... Fifty pages in and it has all got very nasty very quick!
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Post by dem bones on Mar 25, 2014 8:05:34 GMT
"His tale of perversion and slaughter went on and on."
Easy to nominate our invisible man, Sammy Hoffman, as up top of Laymon's all-time most revolting characters, but then you remember the likes of, say, Funland's Jeremy Wayne or the serial killer in Mess Hall and realise they are all of them much of a muchness. As his surname suggests, Sammy is the outcast offspring of the recently dismembered Elsie at the grocery store. A former hit-man of Laveda's many-tentacled Spiritual Development Foundation, Sammy fell in with this bad lot directly after his expulsion from school (he molested a teacher) and hasn't looked back. When the cops nailed him for one of his many assassinations, Laveda worked her necromantic rites to turn Sammy invisible - but only on the understanding that, should he ever do anything to upset her, she would cut his dick off. Hoffman knows Laveda for a woman of her word.
To keep the violence ticking over, Mr and Mrs Donovan are butchered by three of Laveda's cultists with the help of their loving daughter, who also assists in the decapitation of Dr. Milner.
Lacey escapes the invisible rapist and, armed with a can of spray paint, drives to Tucson where she falls in with Scott Bradley, aka 'Max Carter', author of the 'Charlie Dane' detective novels. Scott models his all-action hero on his friend, Matthew Dukane, who, it transpires, is a decorated Vietnam war hero, and a person to be relied upon no matter the crisis. When Scott calls him and explains that an invisible man is trying to kill him, Dukane takes him at his word and drives a straight four hours to pitch in. Between them, Dukane, Scott and Lacey eventually paint and overpower Hoffman who isn't too upset at being taken prisoner - at least he now has three allies versus Laveda, no matter how much they hate his guts. He even allows Scott to record his story for a potential non-fiction blockbuster of The Amityville Horror proportions.
The four hole up in a remote barn. It isn't long before the torture-happy cultists have them surrounded ....
While Beware! may not be the very best Laymon, it certainly doesn't scrimp on bad sex, sadism and sick thrills, and at just over 200 pages you'll likely have burnt through it before you've even realised that you're reading something. The weedy ending reads like a sarcy riposte to the Nice Horror Only brigade who hammered The Cellar's nihilistic pay-off as too ugly.
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) I must admit I have found bits and pieces of his more sexual text squirm inducing. For instance, 'Allhallow's Eve' spends time - more than once - describing erections from 13 year old boys, and then tells us what they'd like to be doing with their classmates and teachers..... It totally works for shock factor, but doesn't move the story along!
