A Writer's Tale

by Richard Laymon

  Many readers probably feel especially uncomfortable if they find themselves drawn to such sordid material. Good people are not supposed to enjoy reading about these things. If they do like it, many of them undoubtedly suffer feelings of guilt.

  Reading horror is like looking at pornography.

  Plenty of people might want to do it, but they know it would be wrong. It would be dirty.

  They should be ashamed of themselves for liking it.

  And if they’re caught, what would other people think of their dirty little secret?

  As a result, these good people scorn horror novels.

  They scorn horror writers as if we are smut peddlers… peddling smut they would love to get their hands on if they could only do so without risking embarrassment, damnation, or ridicule.

  LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! ATTENTION, PLEASE!

  I HAVE AN IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT TO MAKE!

  I have just stumbled onto the reason that, while most horror writers are reviled, the mega-stars of horror are revered.

  They provide a culturally acceptable outlet for those who long to wallow in horror.

  “I’ll go to them!” the readers say to themselves (subconsciously I don’t imagine they realize this is going on). “That way, I’ll still be able to get my share of goosebumps and thrills, still be able to relish the joys of dismemberment, rape, incest, cannibalism, vampires the whole voyeuristic nine yards but with no risk to my self-esteem because these books are bestsellers! Everyone reads them. If everyone is doing it, there’s no reason for me to feel guilty, no reason for me to feel as if I’m a slumming illiterate wallowing in trash.”

  “Trash is what the rest of them write: the Big Three write literature.”

  * * *

  That was my “deep” answer to the question, “Why do general readers hate us but love the Big Three?” Here is another answer, not so deep, but perhaps no less valid.

  Too many “horror writers” do turn out poorly written, empty headed, violent, gory, depressing, mean-spirited, immoral, unbelievable swill about nonsense. If that weren’t bad enough, much of it is boring.

  For years, (once you’ve eliminated the shelf-loads of books by Koontz. King and Rice) the “horror sections” of bookstores have been loaded with books so poorly conceived and written that they should never have been published in the first place.

  Certainly, excellent horror novels have also been published.

  But they are surrounded by horribly written, annoying, boring junk.

  If as a reader, you take a chance on a horror novel by a writer you’ve never heard of, you stand about a 20 to 1 chance of wishing you hadn’t.

  I am a horror writer. I am a fan of horror literature. I love to lay my hands on a book that’ll pull me in and scare the hell out of me.

  I almost never buy a novel from any bookstore’s “horror section.”

  In my head, there is a small, select list of horror writers I trust. I pretty much stick with them, because I’ve been burnt too many times. It’ll be a fairly cold day in hell before I snatch up a “horror book” by someone whose name I don’t know.

  Because it’s almost sure to stink.

  The problem is, nearly all of us are tainted by the stink.

  Horror writers such as Dean Koontz, Stephen King and Anne Rice managed to rise above the stink because they wrote stuff that was so strikingly good that publishers got behind them in spite of their subject matter. They rose above the “horror genre,” and into the fresh air of mainstream acceptance.

  The only way for the rest of us to get un-tainted is to achieve bestseller status, which is pretty hard to do if you’re down there on shelves loaded with crappy horror novels. It’s a Catch-22.

  Which is why so many of us turn away from horror.

  Some of the best horror writers in this country are now writing mainstream novels, espionage novels, crime novels, medical thrillers, romance novels, suspense novels, historical novels, juveniles, movie scripts, comic books, computer games, etc. Some have apparently quit writing altogether.

  I could name them.

  I suspect they got tired of living in the ghetto.

  Got tired of being scorned, ignored and underpaid.

  This leaves us with somewhat less than a handful of mega-stars making millions of dollars every year, and a small crowd of horror writers struggling at the bottom of the barrel, usually making no more than $10,000 per book but frequently getting more like $2,000 - 5,000.

  Most of the good writers at the bottom of the barrel get out. They move on to more lucrative pursuits.

  This is just dandy with the publishers, because there are always new writers jumping in.

  The publishers of horror fiction love new writers.

  Beginners are so eager for a first sale that they’ll go for anything. They don’t care if they’re at the bottom of the barrel they just want to be in the barrel Publishers can get them to sign contracts that would disgust a seasoned writer. A novice will sign away all rights to a book forever for $1,500.

  The new kid who’ll sell his horror novel for peanuts might not be as good a writer as the pro, but that doesn’t matter. To the publisher’s way of thinking, the readers will never know the difference.

  In the immortal words of a certain powerful New York editor, “Why should I pay Richard Laymon ten thousand dollars for a book when I can get one from Joe Schmow off the street for two thousand?”

  LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! ATTENTION PLEASE!

  I HAVE A SECOND MAJOR ANNOUNCEMENT TO MAKE!

  Guess what? The big establishment New York publishing industry thinks FOC/are trash.

  Holds you in contempt.

  You are as vile and worthless as the people who write the horror you hope to read.

  If publishers assume (and believe me they do) that all non-star horror writers are interchangeable and dispensible, it is because they think that those of you who read us don’t know the difference.

  They think you have such lousy taste buds in your choice or reading material that you can’t tell the difference between top sirloin, ground chuck, and dog shit.

  So they are inclined to throw you whatever is cheapest.

  And guess what that is?

  Given such a state of affairs, those in the business of providing meat go out of business.

  Which, in my opinion, goes far toward explaining why we lovers of horror fiction have such a difficult time finding the good stuff.

  How do you find the good stuff?

  First, follow authors. Know your favorite horror writers and stick with them, even if they write “non-horror” books. The qualities that drew you to these writers will still be there, even if they have turned to adventure novels or medical thrillers or whatever.

  Second, keep an eye on the small presses. They are not immune to publishing crap, but some small presses do bring out quality horror books by major authors who have been trashed by the New York literary establishment.

  Third, find yourself a book store or mail-order dealer who can provide you with books published in England. It appears to me and to a great many other horror writers of my acquaintance), that publishers in the UK still care about quality fiction and respect authors. Not only do such companies as Hodder/Headline publish overlooked American authors, but they publish books by some wonderful UK authors, as well.

  Fourth, keep an open mind. In bookstores, don’t spend all your time inspecting the horror section. Excellent horror novels are being published by major U.S. houses on a fairly regular basis but they are disguised. They aren’t promoted as horror. Instead, they are labeled suspense or thriller or simply fiction. They might be found in just about any section of a bookstore. For instance, I’ve found copies of my books in the science fiction section. A couple of times, I’ve even found horror novels (such as The Amityville Horror) tucked away in the non-fiction section of major bookstores.

  You need to study covers. You need to read a few pages.

  The situation is so ironic.


  The same U.S. publishers who despise horror and readers of horror will go out of their way to write the most lurid, shocking cover material imaginable for their mass market mainstream thrillers. They know that readers hunger for scary, graphic stuff. They are so aware of the taste for grue that they actually write misleading cover material, trying to make even mild, tame suspense novels sound more gruesome than The Silence of the Lambs.

  And yet they despise horror fiction, its writers and readers.

  What gives?

  What is going on with horror in the U.S. publishing industry?

  The more I look into the situation, the more complex it seems to be. It is a bundle of contradictions, ironies, paradoxes.

  Horror is frowned upon by most publishers and readers in spite of the fact that three of the best-selling, most highly-regarded writers in the country are blatantly writing horror novels.

  On top of that, what about “literary” authors?

  How can it be that the very same people who loathe the writers of horror fiction somehow manage to revere such figures as Homer, Virgil, Sophocles, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Dickens, Dostoevski, Poe, Conrad, Melville, Hawthorne, Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Brontes, Shelley, Colderidge, Faulkner, Bradbury… ?

  The list could go on and on. Every one of them wrote material that I would call horror.

  You’d be hard-pressed to name any major literary figure in history who did not write stories or poetry that could reasonably be defined as “horror.”

  And yet those of us who do it here in America at the tail end of Twentieth Century are worthless writers turning out trash that nobody wants to read.

  Well, well, well…

  They can despise us. They can reject our books. They can pay us next to nothing for the few books that they do buy. They can drive many of us away.

  But some of us…

  Well, we ain’t going nowhere.

  We were here first, and we’ll be here to the last.

  The first stories ever told around campfires in the dead of night ages before anyone ever dreamed of a publishing industry were tales of horror.

  And if there is to be a final tale told somewhere to a tiny, huddled group of survivors waiting for the end, I know what sort of story it will be.

  It won’t be a contemporary romance.

  It won’t be a courtroom drama.

  It won’t be a techno-thriller.

  It won’t be about Hollywood wives or covered bridges or feisty career girls or a professor’s identity crisis.

  Hope.

  It’ll be about what’s out there in the dark… and coming for them.

  It’ll be a horror tale.

  50 Favorite Horror Authors

  THIS IS A LIST OF WRITERS WHO HAVE WRITTEN EITHER ONE GREAT PIECE or a body of work that I have found to be exceptionally wonderful and frightening.

  Remember, this is not supposed to be a list of “the best” horror writers: it is a list of my favorites.

  1. Peter Benchley

  2. Ambrose Bierce

  3. Algernon Blackwood

  4. William Peter Blatty

  5. Robert Bloch

  6. Ray Bradbury

  7. Gary Brandner

  8. Michael Cadnum

  9. Wilkie Collins

  10. John Coyne

  11. Michael Crichton

  12. Roald Dahl

  13. Charles Dickens

  14. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  15. Larry Dunbar

  16. Ed Gorman

  17. Davis Grubb

  18. H. Rider Haggard

  19. Nathaniel Hawthorne

  20. James Herbert

  21. William Hope Hodgson

  22. Shirley Jackson

  23. W.W. Jacobs

  24. M.R. James

  25. Jack Ketchum

  26. Stephen King

  7. Rudyard Kipling

  28. Dean Koontz

  29. Ira Levin

  30. Bentley Little

  31. H.P. Lovecraft

  32. Brian Lumley

  33. Graham Masterton

  34. Richard Matheson

  35. Robert R. McCammon

  36. David Morrell

  37. Edgar Allan Poe

  38. Seabury Quinn

  39. Ray Russell

  40. John Russo

  41. Saki

  42. William Shakespeare

  43. Mary Shelley

  44. Dan Simmons

  45. Michael Slade

  46. Robert Lewis Stevenson

  47. Bram Stoker

  48. H.G. Wells

  49. F. Paul Wilson

  50. Cornell Woolrich

  My 51 Favorite Non-Horror Authors

  MY LIST CONTAINS A FEW NAMES PREVIOUSLY MENTIONED AS HORROR writers. I’ve done this in cases in which a writer has also distinguished himself or herself in writing “non-horror” fiction.

  1. Sherwood Anderson

  2. Lawrence Block

  3. John Buchan

  4. Tom Clancy

  5. Mary Higgins Clark

  6. Joseph Conrad

  7. Pat Conroy

  8. Michael Crichton

  9. Charles Dickens

  10. Franklin W. Dixon

  11. Feodor Dostoevsky

  12. William Faulkner

  13. Jack Finney

  14. F. Scott Fitzgerald

  15. Ian Fleming

  16. Brian Garfield

  17. William Goldman

  18. David Goodis

  19. Ed Gorman

  20. Winston Groom

  21. Joseph Hayes

  22. Ernest Hemingway

  23. Evan Hunter

  24. Stephen Hunter

  25. Nikos Kazantzakis

  26. Jack Kerouac

  27. Dean Koontz

  28. D.H. Lawrence

  29. Jack London

  30. John D. MacDonald

  31. W. Somerset Maugham

  32. Larry McMurtry

  33. David Morrell

  34. Charles Portis

  35. Flannery O’Connor

  36. Ayn Rand

  37. Bob Randall

  38. Harold Robbins

  39. J.D. Salinger

  40. Mickey Spillane

  41. Glendon Swarthout

  42. Robert Lewis Taylor

  43. Jim Thompson

  44. Trevanian

  45. Mark Twain

  46. Leon Uris

  47. Joseph Wambaugh

  48. Thomas Wolfe

  49. Stuart Woods

  50. Cornell Woolrich

  51. P.C. Wren

  Laymon’s Rules of Writing

  Rule 1

  “Write the book that you would like to read.”

  I don’t know where I first ran into that idea, but I think it’s great. And it contradicts advice that writers often encounter, especially when they are starting out.

  Writer magazines, how-to books, teachers and even many agents and editors (who should really know better) suggest that the road to success runs through the Land of Imitation.

  They advise you to write “more like” someone else.

  More like Mary Higgins Clark, more like Sidney Sheldon, more like John Grisham, etc.

  Deal is this…

  Why try to write a book that is “like” what someone else has written?

  Someone else is already writing that sort of stuff.

  The last thing the world needs is another cheap imitation.

  But you’ll likely be told otherwise.

  If you jump on someone else’s bandwagon and do a fair job of appealing to an established audience, you might get a publisher to hype your novel, and you might end up rich and famous.

  You could then be a rich and famous hack.

  Chances are, though, you won’t get rich and famous.

  In which case, you’ll just be a poor, unknown hack.

  If you want to be something more than that, walk away from the well paved road and blaze your own trails into unknow
n territory.

  Here’s how to do it.

  Sit down and ask yourself this: If I could read a book about anything, what would it be about? Where and when would it take place? What would the main guy be like? What sort of gal would I love to read about in a book, if such a book existed? What might happen to these people that would be really neat?

  And so on.

  Find the answers to those questions.

  Then figure out if such a book already exists.

  Which means you need to be well-read.

  If your ideal book already exists, you would be ill-advised to go ahead and write your own version of it.

  If it doesn’t exist, you’re in luck.

  Write it.

  Write it your way.

  As Polonius said, “To thine own self be true.”

  As Ricky Nelson sang, “You can’t please everyone, so you’ve gotta please yourself.”

  Set out to please yourself. With a little luck, you may end up pleasing others, as well.

  Rule 2

  “Learn How to Write.”

  I have always been a master of stating the obvious.

  The obvious, however, is quite often undervalued and overlooked.

  I find it astonishing that a great many writers pursue their craft and sullen art without having a halfway decent grasp of language, grammar, punctuation, spelling, etc.

  Just about everyone has daydreams about being an author.

  We all like to tell stories. Most of us are able to read and speak English reasonably well.

  We have even written things, now and then: letters, thank you notes, maybe reports of various kinds at school and work. So it seems a simple matter to write a story.

  Easy as pie. Anyone can do it.

  At a cocktail party, a famous writer (possibly George Bernard Shaw) was told by a famous surgeon, “When I retire, I plan to write a novel.” Said the author, “When I retire, I plan to operate on people.”