Horror Review: Out Are the Lights by Richard Laymon (1993, Headline)

This is a cherished part of my Laymon library. Not because it's my favorite book of his or anything, but because my lovely wife gave it to me as an anniversary gift a number of years back, along with Dreadful Tales, Fiends, Alarums, and Allhallow's Eve.

These five books filled in the final five gaps of my 'cheapie' Laymon collection. All I'm missing now are expensive books (A Writer's Tale, In Laymon's Terms, his Fastbacks, etc...), and a number of his hardcover releases that I already have copies of in paperback, but I keep my eyes open nonetheless. They've got to cross my path at some point, don't they?

Of course they do. Thankfully, between the ebook market and the stuff on my shelf, I've got a complete Laymon reading library at my disposal. That means the rest of you are in for a few dozen more book reviews as time goes by. Sorry, not sorry. :)

Out Are the Lights is actually an anthology. The first story is the title piece, which runs 238 pages. Pages 239 - 344 are filled out with five more short stories: Mess Hall, Dinker's Pond, Madman Stan, Bad News, and The Tub but we'll get to those in due time. Please silence your cell phones, and no talking during the movie. The concession stand's still open, and you have a few minutes to grab some popcorn and a drink before the feature presentation starts.

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All settled in? Good. Let the show begin.

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Before getting into the plot and characters, I'd like to point out a few things I love about this anthology that aren't immediately story-related. Out Are the Lights may seem like a nod to horror movies given the subject matter and the fact it name-drops every infamous film from Night of the Living Dead and Texas Chain Saw Massacre to Halloween and The Hills Have Eyes within the first few pages, but I'm not inclined to agree given that a mere two years later, Laymon wrote Night Show. Night Show is an overt tip of the hat to the horror film industry, and Laymon wasn't apt to revisit scenarios so soon after he'd already done so the first time.

Instead, I propose a different idea: Out Are the Lights is an homage, but not to cinema. This is Laymon giving a nod and a wink to another mainstay of his youth: pre-code comics from the likes of EC, Ace, and Fawcett. Titles like Tomb of Terror, Weird Chills, Eerie, and Fantastic Fears thrilled and frightened the youth of Laymon's generation, and their plots, while simple and compact, were delivered with an artistic style where what you didn't see was just as important as what you did. Stories centered around revenge, whether of revenants returned from the grave or ordinary people of ordinary means paying back the dirty deeds done to them, were extremely popular. Often the stories in these comics 'ended' just as the terrible revenge was struck, leaving the reader to imagine for himself the full consequences as the hordes of zombies close in, the fire creeps closer, or the first spadeful of dirt dashes against the lid of the coffin.

Awful people doing awful things and receiving their comeuppance was the order of the day, and while many of Laymon's tales feature an innocent taking revenge on his (or more often, her) enemies, none of them takes such a great and perverse delight in the revelation and vengeance as Out Are the Lights does. If you've not read Out Are the Lights before, but you're familiar with the storytelling tropes and devices of the pre-code horror comics and keep them in mind while reading, I think you'll get much more out of the story than a straightforward reading may otherwise deliver.

But that's just one man's opinion, and you know what they say about opinions.

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The Haunted Palace theater has an extra special treat for folks braving its weekend evening horror fares. Between the billed double features, audiences get the first look at some truly horrific pieces of underground auteur cinema. Running only ten to fifteen minutes, with obviously overdubbed dialogue and low-budget amateur production values, these grisly terrors all feature Otto Schreck, a cinematic beast who delights in dispatching his teenage protagonists in unique and horrible ways, with visual effects rivaling those of the best gore artists in the business. Whether he's playing a blood-drinking vampire, an out-of-control savage, or an ax-wielding madman, Schreck's antics both enthrall and discomfit audiences, prompting them to return, week after week, to witness the next work of depravity and hypothesize how he makes decapitations, surgeries, amputations, and other grotesque visuals so life-like.

The truth is, Schreck has no need of an effects budget because it's far easier to scalp, stab, disembowel and mutilate his young victims for real while the director catches it all on tape. With the help of his friends, the director lures in victims who are far from home and who won't be missed. Since each of his masterpieces only screens once at one independent movie house in California, all his victims' lines are overdubbed, and no one in the audience has any reason to suspect they're seeing real life captured on tape, Schreck and his director have little concern of getting caught.

If only Connie hadn't crossed their path.

Connie, who was taught to defend herself by an ex-Marine. Connie, who's broken up with her boyfriend Dalton because he's been cheating on her. Connie, who's found herself a new man in Pete, the sexy private investigator who's in town looking for his old girlfriend who ran out on him after leaving some confusing messages on his answering machine begging for his help. Connie, who unknowingly holds the key to uncovering Schreck's horrible scheme.

All she has to do is go to the movies...

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Out Are the Lights is early Laymon: characters aren't as developed, the story isn't as padded (Island this ain't), but the action still moves along at a brisk pace. Laymon's strengths in his earlier works are their breakneck pace: several weeks pass in the span of 238 pages, but it feels like mere days since Laymon never lets off the gas.

I enjoy Connie as a protagonist. While she's not the most level-headed of Laymon's main characters, she's certainly not the dumbest either and the fact she successfully navigates the world with a disadvantage any of us would hate to suffer (and does so with such an 'oh well, life sucks, get a helmet' attitude) is...I'm not going to say 'inspiring' necessarily, but it's very nice to see a character like her who isn't a victim. I'm being deliberately vague here because the reader doesn't discover this about Connie until well into the story, and Laymon is very good at not giving away the game. Revealing what's different about Connie isn't a spoiler, per se, but it does play a role in the plot, so I'm not going to blow it.

As for the other characters, they're kind of a mixed bag. Pete the P.I. is an OK guy, even if he takes Connie's ex- too seriously. He's right to, considering what Dal and his co-conspirator Elizabeth have in the works for them, but the guy flat-out breaks the law by impersonating a law enforcement officer, and the results of his actions cost Dal his job. This is a crime the guy could not only serve time for, but could very easily be stripped of his license as a private investigator, yet his reaction when Connie points it out reminds me a frat boy shrugging off the fact that, yeah, the house threw an alcohol-fueled bender yesterday, and one guy got arrested for public intox, but he probably won't blab to the dean, so it's all good.

Dal's an interesting antagonist. I don't call him a villain because he's not really evil, just easily waylaid and misled by others, especially Elizabeth, who ensnares him in her web early on. Elizabeth's the definition of the femme fatale black widow: unaffected by conscience or morals, and willing to go to truly tremendous lengths to get back at those who wrong her, as her husband discovered to his chagrin. Holy hell, do not cross this woman! :D

These characters all interact in what would be a comedy of errors if we weren't reading a horror novel, and it's only by sheerest chance that Connie gets caught up in Schreck's business. A part of me likes this, since it's often coincidence in real life that leads to the most interesting encounters, that 'wrong place, wrong time' deal. But there's not much of a collision course plotted by Laymon in this one, at least not with the Schreck side-plot, and I've never been a fan of coincidence resulting in resolution. There are steps taken to establish Connie's abilities, so the final chapter doesn't hit you out of nowhere, but without these two plotlines overlapping we have a relatively mundane game of brinksmanship between four people driving the novel forward and it's just not as high-stakes as the amateur filmmaker sub-plot...and yet, when viewed as a pre-code comics narrative, it all makes sense. Especially Elizabeth's vendetta against her husband.

In case you really missed the ball, the Epilogue drives it home: this is all in good (awful) fun, the bad guys all get what was coming to them, and the good guys live happily ever after. Close the cover, call 'cut', put it in the can, and that's a wrap, people.

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Only it's not the end, is it? We have five other short tales of depravity to fill out the rest of the page count.

Mess Hall I had encountered before in the horror anthology Book of the Dead edited by John Skipp and Craig Spector. It was an OK zombie tale then, and not much has changed today. Perhaps the most notable thing about it is that Laymon never bows to the traditional or conventional wisdom when it comes to his use of any of your typical supernatural horrors. His zombies are nothing like your average Romero-inspired shambling corpses, and it's actually not clear this is a zombie story until the story's climax. It plays like your traditional serial killer tale until the dead start walking, and given that it starts with the protagonist mostly naked and humping away at her boyfriend, it's about the most Laymon-esque zombie story you'll ever read. It's also EC as hell.

Dinker's Pond is a short tale-within-a-tale about a woman who comes between two would-be gold prospectors and her fate when she chances to take a dip in the titular body of water. Another very simple narrative related in that pre-code style that stitches together this anthology like the Y-incision of an autopsy.

Madman Stan is, in my opinion, not only the gem of the anthology, but one of the best short pieces Laymon ever produced. This one wouldn't have been out of place in one of those classic "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" anthologies that kids my age grew up reading. It's the story of an easily-scared child and his mean old babysitter, who regales him with the worst bedtime story/urban legend imaginable. It takes place right there in town where they live, of course, and it involves 'Madman Stan', a maniac who just can't resist going out at night, walking up and down the streets, looking for doors that have been left unlocked. I'm not going to lie, I was double- and triple-checking the deadbolts on the doors before I went to bed for weeks after I read this one the first time. It's both creepy and creative, with the best final line twist to any Laymon piece since Island. It's worth picking up the book for this one alone.

Bad News is one of those monster stories where everything starts out normal then events rapidly swirl down the drain. If you've read Laymon's novel Flesh, then you know what to expect here, as the creature that shows up in the morning newspaper to harass Paul and his family is one of the invulnerable tooth-mouth slug critters featured in that book. Reminded me of King in a way, not for Laymon's way with words, but because the ending is one of those non-endings King is famous for: the initial danger is over, but safety is far from guaranteed. If you're OK with that, you'll like Bad News. Otherwise you can skip this one as its the weakest of the bunch.

Finally, we reach The Tub. This one's another EC-style fare all the way, with a cheating wife who calls her boyfriend over for a game of 'hide the meat popsicle' while her cuckold husband's out of town, only to get trapped in the bathtub under the weight of her steroid-popping side when he suffers a heart attack and dies. With an entire weekend before dear Harold gets back in town, Joyce is on her own with only the dead body of her lover as company. Question is, what's her husband going to do when he arrives home to find her cheating on him with a corpse if she can't get herself extricated? There are two twists to the ending with this one, and I'd have honestly found it more satisfying without the second. Not quite as weak as Bad News, but I find this one of the rare times Laymon totally missed the mark. Interestingly enough, this story was adapted to the screen as a short film of the same name in 2003. You can watch the teaser for it if you like:

I'm honestly not sure what would possess someone to want to adapt this particular Laymon story, and I'm even less sure why, upon securing the rights, Carter Doyle (the director and screenwriter ) would run it off on a completely unrelated tangent. Laymon's piece is a mundane, straightforward thriller, and Doyle turns it into a bizarre paranormal affair involving curses and other mystical crap completely absent from the story. Note to film writers everywhere: this is why novelists cringe at the thought of other people adapting their work and sometimes disavow the results. That's not to say the author's always right (Kubrick's The Shining is a phenomenal film, no matter what King thought of it at the time), but let's just say there's a reason so few of the films based on King's body of work are considered major successes.

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All told, Out Are the Lights is a mixed bag. I'm of the opinion that Laymon's longform writings are superior to his short stories with very few exceptions, and Madman Stan's presence here doesn't hurt the presentation at all. Buy the book for it and the titular novella, and consider yourself lucky if you derive any enjoyment out of the other four stories as they aren't all that memorable. Three scalped victims out of five.

Best Scene:

Mess Hall, Dinker's Pond, The Tub, and Bad News don't stay around long enough to leave us with anything worth retaining aside from their endings. Madman Stan's best scene is one I won't talk about, because you deserve to go into it with no idea of what's about to happen.

For Out Are the Lights though, the book's most memorable scene for me is when Connie sits down to enjoy the horror double feature and not only realizes there's something off about the film, but also that she's the only one in the entire packed theater who recognizes what she's actually watching. That dawning horror is the pivotal point of the story, and the one thing you'll remember long after you've put the book back on your shelf.

If you're expecting to see that scene depicted on the cover though, don't hold your breath. I've no idea why the artist was told to illustrate this, because neither the tied-down hand nor the creepy spider crawling over it have any relevance to the plots of any of the stories within. I mean, it's cool artwork and all, but it's got nothing to do with the contents. It's not the first horror novel to suffer this fate, and it won't be the last, but I expected more of Headline than this considering some of the other covers they've done for Laymon's books.