Night Show by Richard Laymon (1984): Master of Chills is Pulling Your Strings

If you're a regular reader of this blog, then you know I'm not much of a Richard Laymon fan. The two novels of his that I've read, Resurrection Dreams and The Cellar, struck me as dopey and lame, and in the case of the latter book, boring and stupidly repulsive at once. This puts me at odds with many horror fiction fans, since the late Laymon has become a cult writer with a large (and vocal!) following. Many think he is the ultimate horror writer, one who shocks and goes too far and cares not a whit for taste or restraint. Fine for his fans, sure, but my problem with Laymon is simply that he is, going by what I've read, a terrible writer. When it comes to putting pen to paper he cannot deliver. He writes like a rank amateur and it drives me fucking crazy, reading "prose" so lunkheaded and dull, so square and humorless.

Some readers agree with me and can't understand his popularity either. Cool. But I'm also kinda intrigued by what his fans see in him, so I have been open to giving him another chance. I found Night Show (Tor 1986, originally published in the UK by Futura, 1984) online for cheap. Always liked the cover (thanks Jill Bauman, a Tor regular), and it takes place in Hollywood and the main character is a female Tom Savini. All right, not bad, I thought, let's check it out, see if Laymon can do this.

Aaaand... he doesn't. He can't. His scenario is fine - weirdo horror-filmmaker wannabe wants to apprentice with female FX expert and so begins to stalk her - but Laymon's delivery fails in every aspect: it's all dreary, insipid hackwork, same as before. There's not one moment of believable human behavior in Night Show, not one second of fear, not one new twist, nothing to make it stand out among the hundreds of legit horror paperbacks already on my shelves. Laymon even pads out the novel with passages describing onscreen mayhem. Like, not-real mayhem he was tricking you into thinking was real at first. That's right, he actually relates what's going on in the various horror movies being made or being watched. God, now that's lame - hell, in a horror novel it's practically a fucking crime.

I had no sense that Laymon cared or was excited by what he wrote in Night Show (or in the other two novels of his I've read), unlike pulp writers such as Graham Masterton or Shaun Hutson, both of whom at least seem to be having a high old time creating dumb mayhem, which of course translates to enjoyable reading. I had a problem believing in any of the events occurring, and Laymon makes no effort to convince the reader of any truth. As for horror itself, there's virtually none. I had read reviews of the novel that noted this, so I wasn't expecting graphic splatterpunky horror - but when there is blood-spilling, Laymon describes it, more than once, as "red gore." Come on dude, really?

 Original first edition, 1984 Futura UK paperback

Beginning with the abduction of a teenage girl, Night Show is comprised of two interlocking story arcs with nutjob Anthony Johnson being the thread between them. Young bald Tony calls himself the Chill Master and gets off on scaring people. Not hurting them, mind you, but just freaking them out. Like grabbing them in the movie theater, or throwing them into a car and then tying them up in an abandoned house. Sure! But he wants more, so he moves to Hollywood to get close to Dani Larson, gore effects specialist extraordinaire (Laymon does an okay job detailing her FX work at least). He follows her in his hearse (duh) through the LA streets, then finally gets close enough to engage her. Tony wants to be her apprentice in horror but her partner in work and life, Jack, is getting in the way (poor stalkers, ain't that always the way?). The other storyline features teenage Linda, the girl kidnapped and tied up in a spooky old house. She's looking for her assailants - in her escape she runs into the road and is hit by a car - and she'll stop at nothing to get them. Her misadventures mingle Laymon's staple puerile sex and death in a couple ridiculous set-pieces till she ends up in Hollywood hot on Tony's trail.

1992 UK reprint (in the book both head and monster are fake)

Laymon sets everything up in the most banal, one-dimensional manner possible. Plodding along from one chapter to the next, riddled with corny tone-deaf dialogue, nothing in Night Show seems dangerous and nothing that feels real is at stake. Why do I care about these people? Dani deals with Tony in an entirely inappropriate, unbelievable way, inviting him to hang around and even sharing beer with him while Jack looks on bemusedly. And Dani has no strength whatsoever; how in the world did she make it in the movies? A female artist so successful in the horror industry in the 1980s who's not a scream queen is unique, but I had the feeling the character is only female so she can be menaced as the victim. And teenage Linda's storyline is simply a cheap, pale imitation of I Spit on Your Grave: abused woman goes after her attackers, using her sexuality as bait. Since I knew nothing about Linda, I had no reason to believe she had such fortitude to kill and kill again.

So Linda is the real psychopath, while Tony is a total twerp who needs his clock cleaned, but he never really hurts anyone. Was Laymon making an attempt at irony? Perhaps - and certainly not a bad idea at all - but his writing is so lazy, so enervated, that the irony seems more inadvertent than intended. There's no suspenseful build-up, and then when the two storylines do collide, the resultant climax - which is basically the same as a 1970s made-for-TV thriller or a by-the-numbers '80s stalk 'n' slash - goes off like a damp squib. Just... yawn.

I almost feel bad criticizing Night Show like this since it's such a lame little dud, no ambition in it, barely a wisp of an actual novel by and for adults. But I shouldn't. Here Laymon takes the tiredest horror tropes and puts no gloss or originality on them; I find no enjoyment in this kind of cynical exploitation of the genre. Fans make the argument that Laymon's books need to enjoyed in a sort of B-movie way, that they're fast reads that don't require any brain work, that he's raw and lurid, that he peels his prose to the bone and doesn't get bogged down in unnecessary details. I don't buy that argument, and contend that pulp schlock still needs to be competent and fun. I've read plenty of fast, pulpy, lurid horror novels that still have time to give me a unique character trait, an unsettling scene or three, a fresh writing style, a surprising plot twist. Laymon's lack of all that is what so frustrates me. To continue the movie metaphor: the camera's out of focus, the boom mic is visible, the fake blood is red finger paint, and somebody spilled coffee on the only copy of the script so the actors have to come up with their own dialogue on the spot. Yeah, B-movies are wonderful, definitely, but if Laymon's Night Show were a flick, it'd be grade-Z through and through.