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 1980s, 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 I think it would be difficult to find a noir or hardboiled 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.)
EG: You seem to fit most comfortably in the category of “Dark suspense”-crime fiction that is not a whodunit, horrific fiction without a supernatural element. Is that a fair description?
RL: 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 treat 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, 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 “Richard Laymon World” in a later question.
EG: Following your first bestseller, The Cellar, you went through some rough times, right?
RL: 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.”
EG: 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.
RL: 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.
EG: There’s not a “Richard Laymon World” 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?
RL: 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 L.A.P.D. 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.
EG: Describe your average working day.
RL: 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.
EG: What are you working on presently? Do you see any big changes coming in your career?
RL: 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.