My top 10 Richard Laymon novels

My small Richard Laymon Collection.

I'm a big Richard Laymon fan. I've read more than half of his novels and I look forward to devouring the rest. Here's my top 10 list so far. Warning: book impressions contain spoilers.

1. "The Traveling Vampire Show"

The book follows three 16-year olds on an idle summer day. Dwight, Slim and Rusty find fliers for an exotic vampire show coming to their town. The show features Valeria, the world's only living captured vampire. Slim, a feisty tomboy, is attracted to Dwight. Rusty, overweight and perverse, is tired of screwing his younger sister and dreams of nailing Valeria. Will he succeed? The book is a beautiful blend of Bradbury`s Something Wicked This Way Comes and Twain`s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It also echoes Stephen King`s It. However, the final product bears the mark of its author, the master of the grotesque, the supreme perv, the world`s sickest writer, Richard Laymon.

2. "Savage" 


Trevor Bentley, a courageous lad from London, chases Jack the Ripper from Whitechapel to the Wild West. The notorious murdered decides to go to America in order to learn torture techniques from the natives. Following the killer's blood trail, Trevor meets Jesse, a wild tomboy. The love-story is very romantic, as romantic as you can find in a champion of splatterpunk. But will Jesse end up getting raped and carved up by Jack the Ripper? Or will he just scalp her, cut off her tits and let her go? 

3. "Funland" 


This novel has so many things going for it. It`s about teenagers torturing hobos. It`s about mutants and circus freaks. Tanya`s not a happy camper. He got raped by three hobos, some of the many crawling around the Funland Amusement Park. As if that humiliation wasn`t enough, the rapists also cut her up and pissed on her. Now, Tanya is the leader of a group of youngsters who fight the trolls. They torture and kill hobos under the cover of night. But her quest for revenge takes beautiful Tanya and her crew into Jasper Dunn`s lair. The old perv owns Funhouse and Jasper`s Oddities -- a place crowded with freaks of nature like two-headed people and gigantic spiders and such. Is Tanya going to survive or will she get stung again? Will Jasper Dunn manage to eat her up?

4. "Resurrection Dreams" 


A masterpiece with an unforgettable character, Melvin Dodds. Melvin was the biggest creep in Ellsworth High. For a science project, he dug up a girl's fresh body and attempted to bring it back to life with the aid of a battery car. The experiment failed, but his obsession didn't stop. Back from the loony bin, Melvin gives black magic a shot. And it works. The nurse he recently killed is brought back to life. She becomes his sex slave. The only downside is that she is too ferocious in bed; she bites real hard. She's also very needy and annoying. Melvin considers getting rid of her and of other zombies he animated for his own selfish and twisted purposes. But how can you kill what is already dead?

5. "Blood Games"


Five young women, best friends since college, meet every year in search of fun and thrills. This year is Helen`s turn to choose a location for their reunion. Slightly sick and twisted, Helen chooses the Totem Pole Lodge, a deserted resort deep in the woods. Years ago, many people had died there under bizarre circumstances. Something to do with a tribe of cannibals. Needless to say, Helen`s choice proves disastrous.

6. "Come out, tonight" 


Another legendary character, Toby Bones. Toby has the hots for his English teacher, Sherry Gates. But he doesn't stop at masturbating over her, like a normal teen would. Oh, no! That's not how Toby does things! No way! What he does is he kill and eats parts of Sherry`s boyfriend, poor Duane, and then rapes, beats and bites Sherry savagely, leaving her for dead in the wilds. But you know what? Even that doesn`t satisfy Toby`s primal needs. Next, he decides to go after Sherry`s younger sister, Brenda, who is closer to his age and probably tighter. Hopefully a virgin. 

 7. "Body Rides" 


In exchange for (temporarily) saving a woman's life, Neal receives a special bracelet. A bracelet which enables its owner to leave his body and travel inside other people's minds. This opens a world of possibilities for Neal. Having sex with someone while you are in their mind. Letting someone else ride your body. Visiting random people just to see what's it like to be them. You know, kinda like that movie Being John Malkovich. 
There are some problems though: what if your host dies while you are inside? Will you get trapped into their dead body like in a cage for all eternity? Or what if someone kills you while you're away on a body ride? Can you came back? Or will you just wonder around aimlessly? Or what if someone wants to kill you but you don't remember where you put your fucking bracelet?

8. "Darkness, Tell Us"


Angela isn't a happy camper. Growing up, she was repeatedly raped and tortured by her step-dad and step-brothers.The men used to live in a van, driving around in search of new sexual extreme adventures. You know, just living the American Dream. Now, having escaped her tormentors, Angela needs to sell her body to get through college. Since tuition and housing are not cheap, she basically sells herself into slavery. Her landlord, a foul-mouthed, hunchbacked, stinky old men, likes to tie her up naked in the closet and whip her now and again, when tired of screwing her on the dirty mattress in her, otherwise empty, room. To her surprise, Angela's dead mother gets in contact with her and some of her college friends, through a Ouija board. By promising them access to a lost treasure, the ghost facilitates Angela's revenge.  

                                 

 

 9. "Flesh"


 A slimy, slithering ....thing arrived in town, probably from outer space. It has dull eyes and a hideous mouth. It likes to burrow into your brain and turn you into a beast, a killer, a rapist, a new Ted Bundy. 'Nuff Said! 

10. "Cuts" 

Albert Prince doesn`t know how to fuck a woman. What he does is he cuts her belly with a knife, and sticks himself in the wound. Then he pumps the bloody hole till he's done. Will Albert find out how sex really works? And how many women will get mangled in the process?

Emil Cioran's Criticism of Work (stage setting)

Is work intrinsically bad? Are certain jobs dehumanizing? What type of work are we supposed to do if we are to stay true to ourselves and our human nature?  

In the section "Degradation Through Work" (reproduced below) of his book On the Heights of Despair, Romanian existentialist philosopher Emil Cioran makes the point that work is essentially degrading because it engages man in the external reality and trumps the spiritual impulses pertaining to his genuine interiority. 

In the following I take some preliminary steps toward placing Cioran's remarks in the broader context of philosophical thinking about work, human nature and society.

Picture by Lewis Hine

Karl Marx famously argued that the capitalist economic system leads to alienated or estranged labor. The worker losses his humanity and becomes increasingly contaminated by the mechanical or bureaucratic features of the production system he is part of. To illustrate, consider a Filipino worker preparing sandwiches in her sleep, her eyes moving frantically under her eyelids, her lips repeating the menu. Or the Chinese workers manufacturing shoes for Nike while weighing the pros and cons of suicide. (For those who enjoy horror fiction, I recommend reading Marx's description of alienated labor. It's more terrifying than most zombie novels out there! In fact, most horror fiction nowadays is horrific in precisely this sense: it exemplifies the zombification of the artist's imagination in a capitalist economy.) Following Aristotle and Hegel, Marx conceives of man as a social and rational animal who is naturally inclined toward participating in communal, coordinated work in support of the public good. However, Marx argues, the capitalist system distorts that natural tendency and turns man himself into a commodity. 

In contrast to Marx, Emil Cioran's criticism of work is much broader. Cioran rejects the thesis that man is a rational animal and considers man essentially as a spiritual being, an insomniac animal capable of understanding and reflecting in his consciousness the deep mystery of the world, the inner tensions and contradictions of the universe. Man is capable of transcending time into eternity and transfiguring himself into God — be it a dead God, an undead God, or a bored God tired of its own lucidity and prone to bouts of sadomasochism. Since work, on Cioran's view, signifies an engagement with external reality as opposed to a spiritual exercise, it follows that work leads to the repression of man's essential nature. But, as opposed to Marx, this is true for both capitalism and communism and each and every social and economic system which doesn't appreciate man's spiritual destiny. 

But, someone might object, not all work is concerned with the external world. For instance, writing a novel is work, but it also has the spiritual aspect Cioran talks about. I think there is something to this objection and the scope of Cioran's criticism must be clarified. We need to distinguish between different types of work, the complex ways they are connected to the external world, and what kind of objects they produce. However, in Cioran's defense, it's important to emphasize that the commercialization of fiction and art in general turns interiority itself into a commodity. So, then, in a deep sense, interiority itself becomes external. Based on this insight, it's interesting and worthwhile to work out clearly the way contemporary western culture distorts the notion of soul or inner-self. I think one important criterion to be used in discerning authentic interiority is the artist's own expression of the intention animating their work. For instance, a horror writer might say that he just wants to scare people. In his case, his interiority is filtered through an external grid. A different artist might say that his work is a record of his conversations with God. Or, someone might use art as a way of working through obsessions which haunt them. In this latter cases, interiority appears to be genuine, uncorrupted by the external world. Of course, there is always the problem of self-deception; artists who aim for commercial success but immediately repress this desire into the tunnels of their unconscious. 

This issue aside, a different objection to Cioran is that a society in which everyone is focused on their spiritual life will lead to self-destruction because no one will actually do anything. Who will then produce food, build houses or make cars? After all, man needs to adapt to the world if he is to survive. Given his megalomanic nihilism, Cioran will probably observe humanity's self-destruction with delight and even admiration for its romantic heroism. But, for those of us concerned about the future of our species this is an important objection. However, I think that especially in the western culture people are confused about their needs. And this confusion is a product of capitalism, which works best when it manipulates peoples' desires by creating false needs. We think we need a bunch of stuff in order to survive, but we don't. And the belief that acquiring a lot of stuff  leads to better lives is a product of capitalist indoctrination. 

Moreover, a focus on interiority may give rise to a renewed concern for the world, for our community values and traditions. This is one of the important points Heidegger makes in Being and Time and is further developed by Charles Taylor in The Ethics of Authenticity. Simply put, an individual's spiritual development may naturally give rise to a concern in the spiritual development of others. So coordinated communal efforts which lead to meeting the community's members basic needs for food and shelter in order to create the conditions of possibility for their spiritual journeys, are not excluded by Cioran's ideas, but, on some interpretations, naturally flow from them. 

This being said, let's read carefully through young Cioran's short and striking remarks about work. As indicated, this section appears in his first book On the Heights of Despair, a book he published at the tender age of 22, when he was already an 'expert in the problem of death.'

Degradation Through Work

"Men generally work too much to be themselves. Work is a curse which man has turned into pleasure. To work for work’s sake, to enjoy a fruitless endeavor, to imagine that you can fulfill yourself through assiduous labor—all that is disgusting and incomprehensible. Permanent and uninterrupted work dulls, trivializes, and depersonalizes. Work displaces man’s center of interest from the subjective to the objective realm of things. In consequence, man no longer takes an interest in his own destiny but focuses on facts and things. What should be an activity of permanent transfiguration becomes a means of exteriorization, of abandoning one’s inner self. In the modern world, work signifies a purely external activity; man no longer makes himself through it, he makes things. That each of us must have a career, must enter upon a certain form of life which probably does not suit us, illustrates work’s tendency to dull the spirit. Instead of living for himself—not selfishly but growing spiritually—man has become the wretched, impotent slave of external reality.

Where have they all gone; ecstasy, vision, exaltation? Where is the supreme madness or the genuine pleasure of evil? The negative pleasure one finds in work partakes of the poverty and banality of daily life, its pettiness. Why not abandon this futile work and begin anew without repeating the same wasteful mistake? Is subjective consciousness of eternity not enough? It is the feeling for eternity that the frenetic activity and trepidation of work has destroyed in us. Work is the negation of eternity. The more goods we acquire in the temporal realm, the more intense our external work, the less accessible and farther removed is eternity. Hence the limited perspective of active and energetic people, the banality of their thought and actions. I am not contrasting work to either passive contemplation or vague dreaminess, but to an unrealizable transfiguration; nevertheless, I prefer an intelligent and observant laziness to intolerable, terrorizing activity. To awaken the modern world, one must praise laziness. The lazy man has an infinitely keener perception of metaphysical reality than the active one."

Emil Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, University of Chicago Press, 1992.

On Masters and Slaves

There are two kinds of slaves: perfect slaves and imperfect ones. The perfect slaves have no consciousness because they were born with no power or lucidity; their birth is like that of a hammer or a screwdriver. Imperfect slaves realize that they live in a world that isn't the creation of their will, they feel deeply alienated and abused, but they don't have the vitality or pathos to do anything about it, to reclaim their world. 

Authentic people or masters are the ones for whom alienation is unbearable, they are the ones who feel the deep violence that lies beneath everything that others take for granted, of everything banal and mundane. As a result, they have to take charge of their lives and create their living space. Fulfilling this obligation lies in their noble nature. This is why there is a difference in kind between being a master and being a slave. Because slaves, both perfect and imperfect ones, find alienation bearable, only mildly uncomfortable. On the other hand, aristocrats can't take being pushed around, can't take the constant rape, because banality violates their essential being, the origin of their meaning. 

Suicide is always on the master's mind, as an authentic possibility. However, he doesn't put it in practice out of an instinct of self-annihilation, like the slave, but, paradoxically, out of an instinct of self-affirmation. The lucid act is a bright flare shot into the dark, illuminating the trajectory of his will, the front line of his war. 

The powerful and the weak react differently to aggression. This reaction denotes how much energy they are willing to put into fighting the aggressor. The powerful man’s immediate response shows his conviction that he can prevail, whereas the weak man’s timidity expresses lack of vitality. The aristocrat's temporary retreat, when it occurs, doesn't signal weakness, but the preparation for total war. 

While perfect slaves are like a sterile woman’s ruined womb, imperfect slaves resemble mobile graves. They carry inside them children who still breathe, but are forced to play dead; kids with their lips sewn together with the threads of idle chatter, only able to utter a zombified, constant moan. Imperfect slaves live while listening to a dying song whose rhythm projects them in the realm of an aborted freedom, a faded memory of a brain devoured by dementia The sound comes from a coffin; it is the call of insects and worms, the cheep of a chick unable to hatch its egg. Thus, for defective slaves, the space of freedom becomes the space of torture and deep, barely repressed, anxiety. This is why, the imperfect slave stuffs earplugs in his ears and tries to imitate his brother, the perfect slave, by covering himself with the multicolored blanket of obedience.