As I may have mentioned in previous posts, Richard Laymon is my favorite horror writer. Fortunate for me, since the guy published a slew of titles over the course of the thirty or so years he was active prior to his death in 2001. Unfortunate for me, since unlike, say, Stephen King who routinely has print runs in the millions, Laymon's books were only moderately successful here in the US prior to the late 90's when Leisure Publishing finally got him the attention he deserved, which makes collecting his stuff problematic and, occasionally, expensive.
Every day, for the next few days, I'll post about some of the off-beat, weird, or exotic pieces of my collection. Come back tomorrow for a look at some new goodies. Today, we're looking at a few of Laymon's paperbacks released by other North American publishing houses: Tor and Zebra in the US, and Paperjacks in Canada.
As always, all images shown are scanned directly from my own source material.
The Tor Books: Night Show
After all the trouble Laymon had with Warner in 1981 (about which you can read in this exhaustive post about The Woods Are Dark), nobody would touch his work here in the US, and he had to make do with overseas sales. Tor was the first US-based publisher willing to publish him (at least as a horror author under his own name), and four years after Warner's black-balling, they offered him a three-book contract. Night Show fulfilled the first part of that contract.
Night Show, along with his earlier novel, Out Are the Lights, is Laymon's love letter to Hollywood splatter cinema of the 70s and 80s. Protagonist Dani Larson is the best special effects gal in the business. She's earned herself a fan in Tony Johnson, who's come to Hollywood in the hopes of joining her FX crew. But while Dani's content to confine her chills and screams to the silver screen, Tony wants to scare people to death for real. And if Dani doesn't take him under her wing, he has a few ideas of his own on how to make himself her apprentice, her lover, and eventually her replacement.
Tor certainly promoted Night Show better than other publishers handled Laymon's work, identifying him as author of The Cellar and providing cover blurbs by Dean Koontz, Gary Brandner, and Robert R. McCammon, along with some awesome cover artwork by artist Jill Bauman. Despite this, Night Show wasn't a terribly successful novel for Laymon, and copies of this version are fairly uncommon -- expect to pay around $30 for one. As you can see, my copy is in rough shape, but I pulled it off the shelf of a thrift store for 99 cents, so I can't complain.
The Tor Books: Tread Softly
Tread Softly, published in 1987, was the second of Laymon's three-book contract with Tor, and was later republished in mass-market paperback by Leisure as Dark Mountain in 2009. It's your standard story of a happy group of people taking a simple backpacking trip into the California High Sierra mountains, run into an old woman who claims to be a witch and who curses them, then return home to civilization only for all manner of ill-fortunes to befall them.
As with much of Laymon's supernatural fiction, part of the fun of Tread Softly is the is-it-or-isn't-it game Laymon plays with the reader. Is this just a random spate of bad luck the friends all find themselves having, or did the wild old woman somehow manage to hex the lot of them? Either way, you have to admit that cover (once again painted by Jill Bauman, and huge props to Tor for properly crediting their cover artists on the copyright page!) is frickin' awesome.
Tor didn't promote Tread Softly quite as heavily as they did Night Show, dropping the "author of The Cellar" descriptor from Laymon's name on the cover, and only using Koontz's cover blurb on the front. Despite that, Tread Softly sold well enough, and copies of it are more common than Night Show -- this one should run you about half what Night Show does to add to your library.
Flesh was the third novel of Laymon's that Tor published, but unfortunately I don't have that one in my possession. Yet. But I'm always hunting...
The Zebra Books: The Stake
Zebra published mass-market editions of two of Laymon's hardcover releases, Midnight's Lair and The Stake, but since I only have The Stake, it's the one I'll talk about today.
The Stake is the story of horror writer Larry Dunbar. While exploring a California ghost town with his wife and daughter, and two family friends, Dunbar stumbles upon a true-life oddity: the corpse of a long-dead woman with a giant wooden stake hammered through her chest.
Driven to solve the mystery, Larry's research uncovers the identity of the victim: a high school student named Bonnie, not much older than his own teenage daughter, who disappeared in the 1960s. Obviously whoever killed her and stashed her body in the cellar of a deserted ghost town believed her to be a vampire, but such a notion is absurd. Vampires don't exist.
Bonnie's been dead and gone for more than twenty years, but Larry's imagination runs rampant, and he can't get the smiling young woman of the yearbook photo out of his mind. In fact, the more he tries to ignore it, the more he feels her calling out to him, begging for release from her torment. Begging him to remove the stake...
Laymon signed a contract with St. Martin's Press for a four hardcover releases, among which were Midnight's Lair and The Stake. For some reason, without Laymon's knowledge or permission, St. Martin's Press sold the mass-market rights to both books to Zebra for $2,000 apiece, of which Laymon would get half (even in the early 90s, this was a pittance for mass-market rights, and Laymon was rightfully irritated about things).
But Zebra, unlike every other mass-market publisher in the US, honestly seemed to give a shit about Laymon and his books, especially The Stake, which remained in print for well over a decade after Zebra acquired the rights, and included front cover blurbs from both Stephen King and Dean Koontz. For this reason, copies of it are exceptionally easy and inexpensive to acquire. That's a good thing, because The Stake is one of Laymon's best books, and well worth reading even for people who don't care for vampire books. Especially for people who don't care for vampire books.
That's all I'll say about that. ;)
The Paperjacks Books: The Cellar
Paperjacks is a Canadian publisher of mass-market fiction, and they put out three of Laymon's novels: The Cellar, Beware!, and The Beast House. Laymon earned a total of $5,000 for all three, which was, in his own words, "lousy money [...] but better than nothing." All three books were printed only once, in 1987, and as such they're uncommon these days. The only one I've managed to track down so far is this copy of The Cellar, which, if nothing else, has a much better cover than the original Warner edition or the later Leisure mass-market reprint.
They also include a back cover quote from Publisher's Weekly, although I cannot for the life of me locate the actual review where this quote appears. Wouldn't be the first time a publishing house flat-out invented a cover blurb where Laymon was concerned though.
I wrote about The Cellar at length several years ago, so I won't rehash it here. What I will say is the Paperjacks edition has an excellent cover, and I'm pleased as punch to have it in my collection. Paperjacks editions of Laymon's novels are absurdly expensive: expect to drop $30 - $40 for The Cellar, $40 - $45 for Beware!, and upwards of $80 for The Beast House. Unless you're particularly enamored of the cover art, or you just want to own one of everything Laymon ever did (guilty as charged, your honor), there are much less-expensive ways to get copies of these novels into your collection.