Talking Books, Blood and Bodies: An Interview with Richard Laymon

by Mark Leslie

Q: Describe an average day in Richard Laymon’s life? How has that changed (or not changed) since 1980 when your first novel, THE CELLAR, was published?

LAYMON: When I wrote THE CELLAR, I was working as a junior high school librarian. After it was published, I wrote full time for four years before running out of money. Then I worked for four years in various office jobs (while continuing to write my novels and short stories).

For the past 10 or so years, I’ve been writing full time. That means I stay at home. I get up fairly early, spend a while reading, then go to my home office (no commute) to start writing. I usually start at 9 A.M. or earlier, write for something over two hours, then have lunch with my wife. After that, I return to the office and work for about three more hours. I knock off at about 3:30 in the afternoon. Then I relax, reading and maybe having a beverage until dinner at five.

After dinner, I usually read until 8:00 or 9:00 P.M., then relax by watching television for a couple of hours before bedtime. We watch some network TV, but also a lot of taped movies. I usually follow this schedule 7 days a week, but take time off now and then to run errands, go out to lunch or afternoon movies. I also usually spend several weeks each year on trips…doing research and such.

Q: It’s been a long time since you’ve published your poetry. Have you still been writing poetry? Are there any future plans to publish any?

LAYMON: I published some of my early poetry in A WRITER’S TALE. I sometimes write poetry that shows up in my books, such as song lyrics in FUNLAND and in a few other places. I’m not working on a book of poetry, though.

I think writing poetry is wonderful training for a fiction writer. It helps give you a feel for the music of the language, and this is something that will show up in the rhythms of your paragraphs, the way your words flow together, and so on.

Q: In A WRITER’S TALE you list 15 of your all-time favorite books. Not one of them is a horror title. Doesn’t this go against Laymon’s 1st Rule of Writing (mentioned later in that same book), which states “Write the book that you would like to read.”?

LAYMON: Since my list of 15 all-time favorite books appears to contain no “horror” titles, it may seem to contradict my rule that a writer should write the sort of book he would like to read. But I think the contradiction is only on the surface. People familiar with my work will find influences from all 15 of the books listed.

For instance, take my book SAVAGE. It has obvious influences from four of the books on the list, TOM SAWYER, LONESOME DOVE, THE TRAVELS OF JAMIE MACPHEETERS and TRUE GRIT. To an observant and well-read reader, influences of Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, J.D. Salinger, Harold Robbins, Evan Hunter, Davis Grubb and William Goldman can be found throughout my work -- in my writing style, my plots, the points of view I use, and often in the subject matter. Also, I consider THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER to be a horror novel. I wrote in A WRITER’S TALE that the fifteen books “made such strong impressions on me that they inspired me and changed my life.” Some of them are related to why I became a writer, and they’re all related to why I write the way I do.

Q: Is SAVAGE a tribute to Larry McMurtry?

LAYMON: SAVAGE wasn’t just a tribute to Larry McMurtry. It was more of a tribute to picaresque novels in general.

Q: Have you considered writing another heavily researched historical epic like SAVAGE?

LAYMON: I’ve considered doing another “heavily researched historical epic like SAVAGE,” but have no immediate plans for doing so. I pretty much take the books one at a time, and do what “feels right” when I’m ready to begin a new one.

Q: What are you reading right now?

LAYMON: What am I reading now? I usually read about 60 books per year, often working on 3-6 at a time. I’ve just finished reading Stephen King’s THE GIRL WHO LOVED TOM GORDON, Bill Pronzini’s NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT, Heath’s SAVAGE SATURDAY, Tom Clancy’s RAINBOW SIX, and I’m currently working on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, Ernest Hemingway’s TRUE AT FIRST LIGHT, a British edition of collected stories by Arthur Machen, an enormous biography of Tennessee Williams called TOM…and a few other story collections that I hit from time to time.

Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve kept lists of all the books I’ve read. I recommend the practice to everyone who is serious about reading. It’s sort of like keeping a journal of the books you’ve read. It’s fun to look back on and see what you were reading ten or twenty years ago.

Q: COME OUT TONIGHT reveals a thread of tributes to Hemingway and IN THE DARK tips a hat to Thomas Wolfe’s LOOK HOMEWARD ANGEL. Are there any other tributes to your favorite authors or novels that your readers can find in your novels and stories?

LAYMON: My novels are loaded with references and tributes to various authors, books,

poems, movies, etc. They also have quite a lot of what is currently called “self-referencial” material. I couldn’t point them all out even if I were inclined to do so.

While some references are obvious, I also put subtle ones into my fiction as little, hidden treasures that can be found only by those readers who are sharp enough and well-versed enough to notice them. It is fun for me. I only put them in, however, when they’re appropriate to the plot.

Q: When you meet someone at a non-writing related social gathering and they ask what you do, how do you respond?

LAYMON: I say, “Oh, I write books. Novels. Horror novels,

Richard Laymon

scary stuff, you know, sorta like Stephen King except nobody’s heard of me.”

Most people aren’t terribly interested unless they are horror fans. Most people -- if they read “horror” at all, only read Stephen King or Dean Koontz. If they’ve gone to the next level, they might read Straub or Rice, but I’ll still be a nonentity as far as they’re concerned.

At the next level of horror reading, they are actual horror fans and they will probably have heard of me. In a non-writing social situation, I don’t believe I’ve ever met a stranger who has ever heard of me. Of course, if I’m at a horror bookstore or convention, it’s a little different.

Q: What, in your opinion, makes THE STAKE such a riveting horror novel, despite the fact that there is no “monster” throughout the story?

LAYMON: To the extent that THE STAKE may be a “riveting horror novel,” as you say, I think it has a lot to do with focusing on real people and believable situations…keeping the supernatural situation of a possible vampire in the background for much of the story.

To many people, the book seems fairly autobiographical. It does contain a lot of true (but rarely revealed) behind-the-scenes material about being a writer. Also, I think most people can probably identify with the high school material…the nerds and bullies…and readers are probably intrigued by the extremely vicious teacher who rapes and brutalizes and sometimes kills his female students. He is at least as much of a threat throughout the book as anything having to do with the vampire.

Q: THE STAKE, BITE, COME OUT TONIGHT and short stories such as “The Tub” involve inanimate, “lifeless” bodies being manipulated. What about this type of situation fascinates you as a writer?

LAYMON: I’m not sure I am fascinated by the manipulation of “lifeless” bodies. To me, I guess, they’re just part of the landscape. When you write horror, you deal a lot with dead bodies. You can’t avoid them. And you wouldn’t want to. Fooling with them can be grisly, gross, unnerving, or even hilarious. Plus, from a practical standpoint, you don’t want to get CAUGHT with one. So situations involving corpses are just rich with fictional potential.

Q: You must have gotten a kick out of the movie “Weekend At Bernie’s.”

LAYMON: Yeah, I did enjoy WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S. Actually, you must’ve missed my short story, “Joyce,” in which a guy keeps his dead wife around the house -- freeze-dried and lifelike -- much to the dismay of his new wife.

Q: Why horror? What drew you to the genre?

LAYMON: Why horror? You really like to ask loaded questions. I don’t know why I write horror. It’s what comes natural. I’ve always been attracted to scary stories, movies and television shows. And I’ve been attracted to creepy places in real life: carnivals, ghost towns, graveyards, tunnels and caves and mines, abandoned buildings, etc. I like spooky art…such as paintings of moonlit swamps, “haunted houses,” etc. When I sit down to write, I just can’t go for long without being irresistibly compelled to put my characters into an odd situation and have something awful happen.

Of course, the essence of all fiction is conflict. You have to put your characters “up against it” or you simply have no story. On a scale of conflicts, you’ve got emotional turmoil at one end (will he make peace with his father?), all sorts of threats to emotional and physical safety in the middle of the scale… and HORROR at the far end. In horror, the characters face the worst of all possible conflicts. And therefore, horror might be seen as the ultimate form of fiction. I see it that way.

And I’m not the only one. Stories of horror permeate the history of literature from Beowulf, through Chaucer and Shakespeare, through Dickens and Dostoevski and Stevenson, to the present. In fact, nearly every major author in my experience has written material that might be called horror.

As I wrote in A WRITER’S TALE, we are “the specialists of the worst case scenario.”

Q: What scares you?

LAYMON: What scares me? I think there are many different kinds of fear. Except for phobias, most people fear pretty much the same stuff. Me included. In my fiction, I like to explore different sorts of fear but I mostly like to give my readers the “fun” kind…the sort of fear they might feel in the haunted house of a carnival -- not the sort they might feel in a doctor’s office or while getting mugged. I want my books to give people enjoyment, to take their minds away from their own real-life troubles and fears.

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