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Post by dem bones on Dec 21, 2007 8:43:48 GMT
Richard Laymon - Dreadful Tales (Hodder Headline, 2001) Steve Crisp Invitation to Murder The Grab Saving Grace Barney's Bigfoot Museum Herman The Champion The Maiden A Good Cigar is a Smoke I'm not a Criminal Oscar's Audition Into the Pit Spooked The Good Deed The Direct Approach Good Vibrations Phil the Vampire Paying Joe Back The Fur Coat Blarney Dracuson's Driver Roadside Pickup Wishbone First Date Stickman Mop UpBlurb: Shane Malone sits sweltering in front of the computer, thinking how easy is should be to write a contribution for an anthology; an anthology in which every chilling tale must end in the death of a twenty-two-year-old woman in her apartment.
Ideas swirl, but is has to be a grabber - Shane doesn't want to look like a slouch. And the deafening music blaring from next door is not helping. Shane furiously bangs on the neighbour's door, ready to let rip. But Francine just happens to be a twenty-two-year-old woman who will not be argued with...and Shane is about to find out that life really can imitate art.
Apologies for another old post, but I had to return this to the library before I could finish it and there are at least two of his better ones - Mop Up and The Good Deed - I'd yet to get around to. Found a copy in a pound shop yesterday so this time I might get to complete the job. Invitation To Murder: Fortunately, the suspense in many of Laymon's stories isn't so much 'What's going to happen?' but 'When?', otherwise that blurb should be shot as a worse spoiler than anything even the massed ranks of Vault have managed in our time. The fun in this one is sitting in with Shane as he busts a gut over his story, kicking ideas around, wondering if he can pass one cliche off as a tribute to Robert Bloch, etc., before storming off to have a it out with the new gal in 202. The Grab: "Short of a bucking machine, the Bar None had the trappings needed to warm the heart of any yearning cowpoke: sawdust heaped on the floor, Merle Haggard on the jukebox, Coors on tap, and skintight jeans on the lower half of every gal. We mosied up to the bar. "We" being narrator Steve and his friend Clark Addison, ex-disco boy now plastic cowboy. The Bar None Saloon is home to a TEST YER GUTS challenge, "The Grab". Many hard men have tried to snatch the diamond ring from the mouth of what's inside the aquarium and tonight even a girl gives it a go, but nobody's had any joy. Clark, being a mortuary assistant, thinks he has an advantage .... Jerry the barman is a natural for the Worst Pub Landlord thread, and the best in-house entertainment award is sewn up too. I've heard it said that Laymon's shorts aren't up to his best novels, but if I'd written The Grab I'd expect you to erect a plaque outside chez Demonik at the very least. The Champion: Northern California. The clientele of Roy's Bar & Steak House force Harry Barlow to participate in the Saturday Night Fight. He and the undefeated champion are manacled by one ankle and forced to slash and stab at each other until one of them is killed. Similar in plot to Hans Heinz Ewers' ghoulish Tomatoe Sauce. Spooked: Selene hears shuffling noises under her bed. Followed by a groan. But that's stupid! there can't be anybody under the bed! There can't be! Can there? Oh, if only Alex were here. How selfish of him to go out gallivanting on Halloween night. And then a voice. "I'll tear you up!" Barney's Bigfoot Museum: Thomas Hodgson and his party of three hit on a fail-safe get rich quick scheme. Capture a Sasquatch dead or alive. A fortnight of hunting in the forest pays off when Chambers bags a baby bigfoot. Hodgson gets greedy and suggests they use the little 'un as bait to lure out its parents .... Oscar's Audition: Oscar's just out of San Quentin after serving nine years for rape. Second day out and he's getting beaten to a pulp outside the Blue Light Bar until the intervention of a stranger named Clare (don't laugh at his name) wearing a new, ill-fitting rug (don't laugh at that either). Clare explains that Oscar is the kind of guy he's looking for as his partner in a bank heist, but first he'll have to prove himself by holding up a liquor store. Alone. A Good Cigar Is A Smoke: Cleo's relationship with Randy hits the skids when he takes up smoking cigars. She can't stand the smell. During an argument over the subject, he slaps her around. And then she learns he's been sleeping with the woman downstairs. Smoking kills him and Cleo discovers there's a smell she hates even more. First Date: Shannon is a vampire obsessive. After a night at the movies she gets Jeff to drive them over to the cemetery to play in the shadow of the thirteen vaults. She's brought along a knife to make the cutting easier. Direct Approach: Marvin Snye, door-to-door salesman on behalf of Futures Unlimited. Their speciality: they'll kill anybody who stands in the way of your success for a mere $5,000. Peggy Morton has to be interested. Roadside Pick-Up: Maggie was killed on this desolate stretch of road when her car broke down. They never caught the sicko. Now Colleen sets herself up as bait. Again.
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Post by PeterC on Dec 21, 2007 22:40:19 GMT
Dem,
You've turned me on to Richard Laymon and an another anthology of his - 'Fiends' - will be among my Christmas reading.
Peter
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Post by dem bones on Dec 21, 2007 23:54:51 GMT
I hope you're not disappointed, Peter. Like another of my favourites, Charles Birkin, with whom his work shares some very nihilistic tendencies, he divides opinion: loved by some, total anathema to others. I'll be interested to learn what you make of him.
He's not really renowned for his short stories and both Fiends and Dreadful Tales are patchy but - for me - the good reads make up for the more Laymon-on-autopilot moments.
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Post by dem bones on Jan 14, 2008 9:09:47 GMT
Mop Up: Iraq's "Thank You" present to the US of A is the highly contagious Black Widow virus which reduces those infected - virtually the entire civilian population - to Sex-crazed cannibals or "droolers". Mike Phipps is one of the mop up detail, the guys who move into town when the army have fire-cleansed the area and take care of any stray zombies the soldiers have missed. On this latest operation, Mike rescues a girl from one of his sadistic colleagues. Karen is the only civilian Mike's encountered who is immune to the disease and for a little while he stupidly allows himself to see a glimmer of hope ..
An obvious tribute to George Romero's Night Of The Living Dead and sequels, this was originally published in Night Visions #7 (1989) and it's one of the best in the book. At 50+ pages Laymon has enough room to work with and set the reader up for one of his killer unhappy endings.
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Post by dem bones on Feb 10, 2011 10:23:07 GMT
yesterdays mention of the Dark Love anthology set me to looking up Richard Laymon's contribution to same, The Maiden, to see if it qualifies as a proper erotic horror story (it does). The big bonus, though, was continuing with Dreadful Tales and Saving Grace. i'm dead pleased to find this truly horrible story again because it's haunted me to the point where i thought i'd imagined it! Horny fifteen year olds Mike and Jim take a twelve mile cycling trip to Indian Lake to ogle babes. As they near their destination, Jim collides with black van badly parked by the roadside and, hearing a girl's screams from the wood beyond, investigate, hoping beyond hope that she's enjoying an al fresco sex session. They find her in a clearing, suspended naked from a tree, a sadistic psycho busying himself on her tits with a hunting knife and pliers. Before Mike's had time to blink, Jim has launched himself at the creep, catching him a good one on the temple with his binoculars. They untie the girl and use the rope to bind the unconscious maniac, but then there's the problem of what to do with him. Grace, understandably, wants to kill the bastard but the boys insist they have to let the cops handle it. While they're arguing about who should go cycle to the police station and who stay to protect Grace, the prisoner revives. Let's hope the boys made a good job of those knots .....
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Post by Deleted on Feb 10, 2011 20:42:46 GMT
Ah, Richard Laymon. I love him. Indeed, I'm reading Night in Lonesome October just now. No one does (or did) pervy adolescent lust quite like him.
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Post by dem bones on Feb 11, 2011 20:07:27 GMT
You'll get no arguments from me on that score, John. i like that you're never really sure how far he's going to go. sometimes it's not as far as you'd feared/ hoped. But then there are those other occasions ... Herman: This one starts pretty sick and consistently tops itself with each new excursion into bad taste. Everyone scolds Charlie that, now she's thirteen, she really should have left all that "invisible friend" nonsense behind, but Charlie doesn't care. She loves Herman, all seven foot of him. They go everywhere together - she even rides a two-seater bike to accommodate him. it's just a shame she can't see what he looks like. Herman is not only Charlie's best friend, he's her minder too. So when she falls foul of two rapists in the woods it's no cause for alarm. All she has to do is give Herman the word and he'll gut the pair as soon as look at 'em, easy as that. Except Herman's in a voyeuristic mood today (see also The Hunt in Fiends). What harm can it do to procrastinate a while, see what sexy stuff the creeps had in mind? And that's when the story really takes a turn for the nasty. Wishbone: They're still on honeymoon but Diane has already realised her mistake in marrying Scott. Now they've exchanged their vows, she's his official property and Scott's at liberty to treat her as abysmally as he does everyone else. This camping expedition - his idea - has been one long demonstration of Scott at his most bullying and selfish. And now he's pitched their tent directly beneath a tree with a man's skeleton sat high up in its branches! How on earth did it get there? Of course, Scott has to hurl rocks at it, adding disrespect for the dead to a growing list of attractive character traits she's seeing for the first time. Pretty cowardly of him too. It's not as if the bone bag is gonna climb down from it's perch and give him his just desserts ....
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Post by mrvincentstark on Nov 21, 2011 15:26:49 GMT
I find Richard Laymon very hit and miss. Sometimes he is excellent but on others I find him too corny. Still he has a nice accessible style and is indeed a fine writer. He died a year or so ago, I believe
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Post by markus1986 on Nov 25, 2011 11:17:52 GMT
I like Laymon. He has a style that is addictive - he drags you right into the story and doesn't let go. I can read a book of his in an extremely short time. With some authors it can take me as long to read one chapter If I do have a criticism of Laymon though it is that his books are a bit repetitive. He actually died in February 2001. Hard to believe ten years have passed since his passing.
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Post by Johnlprobert on May 14, 2013 21:14:02 GMT
This book has sat on my shelves for years and I've only just now started reading it. I think Mr Laymon has a new convert -i'm only eight stories in but they've all been "proper horror" so far - every story with a proper beginning, middle and end, plenty of humour, good twists, and some of the most outrageous bad taste this side of a John Waters movie. I'm hooked.
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Post by dem bones on May 16, 2013 17:20:44 GMT
This book has sat on my shelves for years and I've only just now started reading it. I think Mr Laymon has a new convert -i'm only eight stories in but they've all been "proper horror" so far - every story with a proper beginning, middle and end, plenty of humour, good twists, and some of the most outrageous bad taste this side of a John Waters movie. I'm hooked. There are so many threads devoted to Laymon's work scattered about the board, i'm tempted to give him his own section except we already have too many by far. Steve Gerlach, who set up the official site, Richard Laymon Kills, evidently doesn't think much of the short fiction, but it works for me. I am sure you'd enjoy the novels, too, Lord P. Don't be put off by their relative bulk. 400 pages of Laymon zips along faster than 150 pages by virtually anyone else you care to mention. Not only is he proper horror, he's proper pulp, too.
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Post by Johnlprobert on May 16, 2013 20:59:51 GMT
This book has sat on my shelves for years and I've only just now started reading it. I think Mr Laymon has a new convert -i'm only eight stories in but they've all been "proper horror" so far - every story with a proper beginning, middle and end, plenty of humour, good twists, and some of the most outrageous bad taste this side of a John Waters movie. I'm hooked. There are so many threads devoted to Laymon's work scattered about the board, i'm tempted to give him his own section except we already have too many by far. Steve Gerlach, who set up the official site, Richard Laymon Kills, evidently doesn't think much of the short fiction, but it works for me. I am sure you'd enjoy the novels, too, Lord P. Don't be put off by their relative bulk. 400 pages of Laymon zips along faster than 150 pages by virtually anyone else you care to mention. Not only is he proper horror, he's proper pulp, too. Goodness! Some intensive paperback buying may be in order!
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Post by dem bones on Oct 16, 2014 19:46:48 GMT
The Maiden: Is Lost Lake really haunted by a penis-eating phantom swimmer? Horny teenager Elmo Blaine is about to find out. Elmo's the new kid in school and he's already upset Prom-Queen-in-waiting Lois Garnett by peeking down her blouse. Now her boyfriend, Cody, and his best pal, Rudy, have invited him out to the woods for the evening. The way they tell it, they're fixing him up with a gorgeous chick who reckons he's hot. Only thing is, he has to swim out to the island to meet her. Elmo, who doesn't get much babe action on account of he's lardy, is up for this - until Rudy let's slip about the Maiden. Forty years ago, a girl drowned here after she'd been gang-raped by her date and his buddies on Prom night. Now she lurks in the depths, patiently awaiting another opportunity to sink her teeth in.
Dracuson's Driver: Pete works the graveyard shift at the Wanderers Rest Motel. It's not such a bad job as Pete gets to spend most of the time ogling female customers - he's fixed all the curtains in the lower floor chalets so that they won't close. Tonight his luck's really in. A gorgeous blonde in this real tight chauffeur's uniform books in. Ok, so she's driving a hearse and insists that the client's coffin be transferred to her room for safe-keeping, but Tess is the best thing that's happened to Pete since that unfortunate business with the school pig, Beth Wiggins, after the Senior's Ball last summer.
When he's sure Tess is asleep, Pete steals into her room. It's kind of creepy that he should find her lying in the coffin but this ain't the time for being too particular. He repeatedly slugs her across the head with his flash-light until she has little left by way of a face, then gets down to business ...
After he's done, Pete gets to thinking that Tess should be good for at least another couple of goes so he takes the Hearse out to an abandoned barn and returns to his room for a well-earned shut-eye. Imagine his joy when that evening he wakes to find a nude Tess, her battered face miraculously restored to its former glory, stood over his bed ....
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Post by dem bones on Apr 20, 2015 14:18:14 GMT
The Fur Coat: Two years on from her husband's death, Janet, 36, braves the world, buys a ticket to Cats as a tribute to dear Harold who so loved their nights out at the theatre. To make the occasion all the more special, she has her hair done, buys a nice new slinky gown and recovers her fur coat from storage. It's a wonderful night until, on leaving the show, she's accosted by two ultra-sadistic female Animal Defence Front demonstrators brandishing cannisters of red paint ..... Proof that Laymon in tree hugging, Save the World, "what about the baby seals?" mode is still offensive as ever.
In The Pit: Luxor, 1926. William Brook, 18, travels with his Egyptologist father to assist Howard Carter shortly after the excavation of King Tutankhamen's tomb. William falls in with a local tearaway, Maged, who promises to introduce him to a pair of hot sixteen year old sisters known to do anything for a piffling five piasters. Unfortunately, Kemwese, the girls' brutal, man mountain of a father, shows up while Will and the girls are engrossed in their orgy. Kemwese dispenses instant justice, hurling the young man down a pitch black pit and sealing the opening with a huge rock. William is soon to discover he is not the first to suffer this appalling fate.
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Post by dem bones on Apr 23, 2015 12:54:08 GMT
Good Vibrations: A different kind of Sandman with an insatiable appetite for young female flesh ....
If there's one thing Kim hates more than guys leering at her on the beach, it's guys not leering at her on the beach. Much to her delight, teenage hunk Sandy Coufax falls into the unabashed lecher category, so she gets to call him a creep and a pervert even as she's laying on a seductive production for his benefit. Much as Kim hates to admit it, she finds the guy absolutely gorgeous. But why does he hide his eyes behind those freaky goggles? The kid agrees to remove them, and he looks so hot that Kim, for all that she detests giving in to men's filthy desires, invites him back to her room. Sandy declines the invitation, shrugging that he can't leave the beach. If they're going to get it on, it will have to be right here.
Phil The Vampire: A tricky case for Cliff Matthews, Private Investigator. His stunningly attractive client, Traci, explains that her husband is a vampire and, although she loves him to the point of insanity, she can't bear when he leaves nights to feed on the blood of other women. It has reached the point where Traci would rather see him proper dead, as opposed to bed-hopping undead, and she'll pay a hefty sum to whoever is up for staking Phil in his coffin. Matthews smells a rat. This woman is either living in a fantasy world or she's fixing to set him for a murder, because v**pires - how many more times!- don't exist!
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