His argument boiled down to this: Richard Laymon was a terrible writer and a terrible person because his characters engaged in sexual behavior that made Mr. Reviewer uncomfortable. Worse yet, the novel contained passages in which the female protagonist was victimized by men.
Holy crap! You mean women aren’t victims of violence in real life? Richard Laymon is just making this stuff up to make women look weak and powerless? Gee, all those statistics you hear about rape and domestic violence on the news must be fake.
And the sexual behavior exhibited by the characters? That was all wrong because they allowed their hormones to influence their decisions, usually yielding a bad result. Well, hey, that doesn’t happen in real life either. Lord knows, I’ve never let sex cloud my judgment.
What a bonehead. Mr. Reviewer, in all his infinite wisdom, had decided Laymon’s work lacked value, simply because it did what it set out to do, which was make him, the reader, squirm. This moron, in all his uppity, politically-correct glory, had never allowed himself to enjoy the unique ride that a Laymon novel provides.
One of Richard Laymon’s gifts as an author was the ability to create flawed, identifiable, intensely human characters. Naturally, as a horror writer, he places these flawed, but essentially good people in the most dire of circumstances. We’re talking life and death stuff here, folks. Very often, these are characters at a crossroads in their life, at a point when they are perhaps least prepared to make decisions which carry heavy implications. In many cases, these vulnerable characters are asked to choose between desire and what society deems proper.
So you have these extremely human protagonists facing not only external conflicts like deranged hitchhikers, serial killers, and the occasional beast, but they’re also battling their own inner conflicts. Conflict, as you know, is what drives the tale. If everybody in a story makes the right decisions, and they all get along, it’s not very interesting, is it? Frankly, it’s not a story at all.
But here’s where Laymon really gets you. This is where his work grabs you by the throat and takes you in a direction most wouldn’t dare. He forces you, the unsuspecting reader, to face those same moral dilemmas as the protagonist. Oh, he’s sneaky about it to be sure. You don’t realize it until you’re too far into the story to stop.
Would you accept the Master of Games’s money and play the game, even if at each new step his game grew more and more dangerous? If your boyfriend went to the corner store and never came back, would you go out looking for him or remain in the safety of your apartment? Tough decisions. And Richard Laymon places you in the middle of it. You can’t help but ask yourself, “What would I do?”
We all have our moral convictions. We also have our weaknesses. What would it take for you to turn your back on those convictions? We like to think of ourselves as righteous people with values we would never lay by the wayside. But hey, people do it every day. Affairs, murder, thefts, kidnap, rape, and all manner of wicked deeds are committed at an alarming rate. I’d be willing to bet a large portion of the perpetrators considered themselves good folks. Chances are, they felt their acts were justified, at least to some degree. Maybe they did it for love. Or maybe they were caught up in a moment of uncharacteristic greed. Or even good old-fashioned revenge. You can bet they rationalized it somehow.
You’d never do that though. Or would you? That’s the brilliance of Richard Laymon’s work. Time and time again, he asks you, the reader, to examine yourself, your own beliefs. Sometimes that’s not easy. Hell, some people don’t want to look deep inside themselves and see the things they would never admit to anyone. It’s easier to say, “No way. I’m one of the good guys. I’d never do anything like that.”
I tend to believe dear Mr. Reviewer falls into that category. It’s too difficult for him to admit that under the right circumstances he might do something shady or even terrible. It’s simply not okay for him to contemplate a scenario whereby his clean, tidy view of the world is disturbed.
Sadly, he’s missing the whole point. Horror is about holding a mirror up to the face of humanity and taking notice of the scars and blemishes, the darkness that bubbles just below the surface. Horror shouldn’t make us feel all warm and snugly. We’re supposed to be shocked, and yes, sometimes even offended. And while we ought to be scared of what’s out there, lurking in the shadows, waiting to grab us, ghoulies and creepy-crawlies aren’t what we should be most afraid of. The most terrifying thing is what’s inside of us, lurking in the shadows of our own souls. The monster within is always more frightening than the one “out there.”
Mr. Reviewer just doesn’t get it. Most of his fellow reviewers and critics don’t get it either.
You and I do though, don’t we? Richard Laymon sure as hell did, and for that we can all be grateful.
William D. Carl
WASN’T LUCKY ENOUGH to ever meet Richard Laymon, as he died before I started scribbling words on paper and attending conventions. I discovered his writing by chance when I purchased a used copy of In the Dark at a local store. It wasn’t long before I was racing to my local chain and eBay and buying all the rest. I was hooked. This occurred at the same time I took up writing short stories, tired of having all these ideas bouncing around in my head, pleading to be set free. One of Laymon’s books was on my bedside table the whole first six months, and I know he was influencing me. From beyond, as it were. With his story structure, his fast pacing, and, especially, with his female protagonists (women who went through hell but fought it the whole way, kicking ass like it was nobody’s business), he guided my hand, helping another new writer through those difficult early times.
William D. Carl
IG.”
The word was like a bullet to her head. It was strange how a single word could affect her, make her break into a cold sweat in the middle of a July heat wave. Still, here she was, shovel in hand, and he’d just told her to “Dig.”
If only her car hadn’t broken down. If only she hadn’t thumbed a ride with this particular man, a character the newspapers had labeled “The Digger.” If only she’d not been looking out the window when she should have been watching him, when he’d whacked her over the head with something.
There were a hell of a lot of “if only”s.
She’d read about The Digger in all the newspapers. Who hadn’t heard about him since the first body had turned up in Yosemite nearly a year ago? The M.O. was always the same. Young women who had been reported as missing were discovered buried in five-foot graves trapped within cardboard refrigerator boxes. Upon closer examination, the coroners had discovered huge, broken blisters on their hands, and the police had come to the conclusion that these women had been forced to dig their own graves, then buried alive. They had been left to suffocate in cardboard boxes. In all, twelve bodies had been discovered by various park rangers and tourists in the past year, all of them young, beautiful women. Women who had once had lives filled with promise. Women who had gasped their final breaths, lungs full of dirt and dust, their broken hands pounding against the earthen walls that surrounded them. No clues had been found as to the identity of the “The Digger,” the man who now held a shotgun on Maura Kennedy. If they ever got to ask her, though, she could supply plenty of details.
He had brown hair, softened by prolonged exposure to sunlight, that swept down over his eyes in a rakish fashion. The nose on his face seemed large, Roman, but it didn’t dominate his other features. His eyes were a deep blue, as though someone had picked a piece of sky and hidden it behind them. In fact, his eyes were what had first attracted Maura to him, what had given her the courage to accept a ride from a stranger. With eyes like that, he couldn’t be dangerous. Could he?