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.
Last month, I wrote a series of posts about the vagaries of collecting Laymon's older works. Unfortunately at that time, there were some items I was still missing from my library and thus couldn't showcase. Well, fast-forward a few weeks and I've filled in some holes and acquired some new goodies, so let's take a look at them now!
The Tor Books: Flesh
In my post about the Tor editions, I mentioned they published three of Laymon's titles. Night Show and Tread Softly were the first two. Flesh is the third, published in 1988, one year after Tread Softly.
Flesh is a different type of story than we'd seen from Laymon up to this point. Rather than dealing with serial killers, vampires, or other phantasms, Flesh is a straight-up creature feature akin to James Herbert's The Rats. Laymon's creepy crawly critters are a lamprey-style parasite that burrows into the victim's skin and chews their way to the brain-stem, taking over the host body. Once so controlled, the victim turns into a ravenous cannibal, hunting and feeding on the flesh of other humans. Killing the host releases the parasites, which then make a bee-line for their next victim so the cycle can continue.
At 407 pages in its Tor incarnation, it's the longest thing Laymon had written up to this point in his career. It was also one of his best-received stories, getting nominated for a Bram Stoker award for Best Horror Novel. It had the misfortune to be published the same year as Thomas Harris's Silence of the Lambs and thus did not win, but that should give you an idea as to its quality.
As you can see, the cover is certainly eye-catching, including pull quotes from both Gary Brandner and Dean Koontz on the front. Unfortunately, Tor didn't include any attribution for the artist on this one so I've no idea who to credit, but it wasn't Jill Bauman who did the covers for Tor's editions of Night Show and Tread Softly. I presume it was painted by a staff artist for Tor and wasn't a commissioned work, hence the lack of credit.
This completes my Tor Laymon collection, and will set you back around $12 to acquire your own copy.
The Zebra Books: Midnight's Lair
Midnight's Lair was the other of two books published by Zebra here in the US. I already wrote about The Stake in a previous article, so here we are.
Like The Stake, Laymon isn't sure exactly how Zebra wound up publishing this book, since the rights were apparently negotiated for this mass-market paperback by St. Martin's Press without his input or authorization, and he received a paltry $1,000 for it. On the bright side, Zebra knew how to market the hell out of their books, and earned Laymon an awful lot of exposure he wouldn't otherwise have received, so it's still a partial win.
Midnight's Lair is about a tour group who gets stuck in the depths of Mordock's Cave after a power failure knocks out the elevators. The guides know of an alternate route out, but it involves a dangerous trek through a flooded portion of the cave system followed by digging through an artificial wall erected years ago, ostensibly to keep the water level consistent. But the truth is, Eli Mordock built the wall to keep something horrible out of the rest of the caverns, something he himself helped to create. And as soon as the wall is breached, everyone trapped in Mordock's cave will be in for the fight of their lives against the nightmares they have unwittingly unleashed.
It's a thin, tightly-scripted disaster novel sure to cure your desire for spelunking, and it's one of my favorite Laymon stories. It wasn't as popular as The Stake, however, so Zebra printed far fewer copies of this one. Today, you can acquire your own copy for around $30, making it one of the most expensive mass-market editions available. It's actually cheaper to get the St. Martin's hardcover, and far less expensive to pick up one of the UK's Headline paperbacks if you don't want a hardback.
The 47North Trades: Funland
I've talked about Funland already in a previous article, so I won't rehash that here, but I do want to explain why this is in my library.
Fun fact: Leisure actually planned on publishing a mass-market version of Funland using this cover artwork before they went out of business in 2010. For a while, there was confusion as to whether or not this edition ever came out; as far as I can tell, the Leisure printing of Funland was advertised and offered for solicitation, but never actually printed.
47North is an imprint of Amazon Publishing, the publishing arm of Amazon.com, which specializes in genre fiction: fantasy, sci-fi, and horror. They offer a slew of Laymon's titles in both print and Kindle format, almost all of which use the same cover art seen on the Leisure mass-market editions. The print editions are trade paperbacks, larger than traditional mass-market editions, but the print is deceptively tiny: it's clear based on the type size and margins that they used the same plates used to print the mass-market editions.
I'm not interested in collecting the 47North editions since I already own a full run of Leisure's Laymon library and they're bulkier than the mass-market versions without being any easier to read, but I made an exception for Funland because it's the only way to get a copy with this particular artwork on it. You can get your own for around $10, and it's been continuously in print since 2013.
That wraps it up for this installment of Richard Laymon's Odds 'n Ends! If I fill in any more gaps, or add anything fun to my collection, I'll be back with another edition. Likewise, if you want to see any more of my collection, including the common Leisure mass-markets or UK Headline editions, let me know in the comments. But for now, this completes both my Tor and Zebra collections and I couldn't be happier. Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next time we go browsing my bookcases for things that go Splatterpunk in the night.