In Laymon's Terms

by ED GORMAN

Originally Published in Mystery Scene July/August 1995

EG: Tell us about Quake, which is now available over here.

RL: An excellent description of Quake was provided in the British periodical Time Out. The reviewer wrote, “LA is hit by the big one, but instead of giving us a standard disaster scenario, Laymon sets up a wicked female-in-peril situation as the earthquake provides a perfect opportunity for pervy Stanley to get his hands on a woman trapped in the ruins of her home. In the aftershock chaos, can her blinded husband and daughter reach the house before she is attacked? There’s enough cat-and-mouse suspense here to leave your nails in shreds.” (By the way, the daughter isn’t blinded—R.L.)

A reviewer for the Manchester Evening News wrote, “It’s a catalogue of horrors that makes Nightmare on Elm Street look as cosy as Coronation Street.”

Quake was inspired by my own earthquake experiences. I’ve been in three large earthquakes (and too many smaller ones to count), but the idea for Quake came to me in the wake of the Whittier shaker of 1987. When it hit, I was alone in a second-story law office in Glendale, not far from the epicenter. I was also about thirty miles from my home in west Los Angeles. After the quake ended, my only concern was getting home to my wife and daughter. Not knowing the extent of the damage, I was terrified for their safety.

I took that experience, magnified the size of the quake, created a bunch of characters, threw in my perceptions of modern Los Angeles civilization (or lack thereof), and presented my own version of how things might be for a family trying to survive—and save each other—after a major quake has broken down not only the walls of the city, but the rules of decent behavior.

In other words, LAPD is shut down and people are left to fend for themselves.

This book was nearly finished when the big quake hit us on January 17, 1994. The manuscript, a stack of about 500 loose pages, was sitting on a wobbly TV tray in my home office. Our chimney separated itself from the house, bookshelves toppled, televisions hit the floor, the refrigerator and stove marched across the kitchen, cupboards emptied themselves onto floors, a window broke, walls cracked, our fireplace collapsed...and after it was all over, I discovered the loose manuscript pages of Quake still neatly stacked on the wobbly TV tray as if nothing had happened.

EG: Quake has all the virtues and none of the vices of too many bestsellers. Big cast, big theme, yet it keeps the voice and viewpoint that make all your books so solid. Were you aiming for a larger audience?

RL: Was I aiming for a larger audience? Not consciously. For the most part, I was just trying to write a book that would please myself, my agent and editor, my friends, and my fans.

In the United Kingdom, all my books have a large audience. Over here, however, none of them since The Cellar has been given enough distribution to have a chance at a large audience.

So, in a way, there seems to be no point in “aiming for a larger audience.” There is a vast potential audience in this country for plenty of writers, including you and me, but the audience isn’t likely to notice any book that isn’t given a large push, at the outset, by a publisher with clout. If it doesn’t get The Big Push, it’ll die on the shelves, mostly unseen and unbought.

My book Savage seemed like a novel with fairly large sales potential. It’s a very unusual book, sort of about an English Huck Finn hunting down Jack the Ripper in the American West, told from the boy’s point of view in a brand new language that mixes British idiom and old American slang. I figured Savage should appeal to mystery fans, western readers, horror fans, plus anyone who enjoys a large, mainstream adventure novel. Add all the Jack the Ripper buffs, and the thing could’ve been a smash.

But it got little or no publicity, a small printing, and very little distribution. In effect, the hordes of people I envisioned falling in love with my book never had a chance to know it exists.

The same goes (to a lesser degree) for The Stake, which I figured had a lot going for it. As vampire novels go, The Stake seemed to have huge mainstream potential.

But it didn’t get the Push.

So...I might as well have written a trite little genre potboiler, for all the difference it made in terms of distribution and sales in the U.S.

Those experiences have given me the idea that “aiming for a larger audience” is a waste of time. No book, no matter how good, has a chance of reaching a large audience unless the publisher SEES the book’s value.

Which makes a nice segue into the next subject. As opposed to what happened in the U.S., The Stake and Savage both did extremely well in Great Britain. (And continue to sell over there, since my entire backlist is in print in the U.K.) The first U.K. printing of Savage went so fast that it’s now a collector’s item here in the States. I’ve heard of people selling copies for $175.00.

EG: Can you explain why you’re now a major name in England but aren’t nearly as well known in your home country over here?

RL: My agent, Bob Tanner, had a lot to do with it. He helped me find publishers who love my stuff and know how to sell it.

Here, we’ve never had such luck.

My British publisher once told me, “We don’t publish books, we publish authors.”

In that one sentence is the heart of the difference.

The author, here, is generally treated like crap. I know of one U.S. editor who said, “Why should I give Laymon $10,000 for a book when I can pull Joe Blow off the street and pay him $2,000?”

Cute, huh?

Do I sound a little annoyed?

I am. I shouldn’t be angry for myself, though. Thanks to England and all the REST of the world, I make an excellent living as a writer. But I resent that, because of what I see as the stupidity of many American editors, there are great numbers of people in the U.S. who are missing out on my books. (Even my American fans resent it. They have to spend twice as much money, or more, because so much of my work is only available in British editions.)

The real shame, however, is that bunches of American writers have to depend for their livelihoods on American publishers.

Plenty of U.S. publishers pay $2,000 to $5,000 for a novel. Very few writers can get more than $10,000-$15,000 for a single book. Which means that most writers are paid so miserably by American publishers that they would need to write four or five books a year (if not ten) to even reach the poverty level established by the U.S. government.

If that isn’t enough of a disgrace, few actually PAY the money on time. They have to be brow-beaten before they’ll put a check in the mail—and THEN many U.S. literary agents will keep the check for a few MORE months, apparently using it to cover gambling losses, or God knows what.

Which may all sound like wild exaggerations—except to those of your readers who are writers. I don’t know a single pro who hasn’t been shafted time and again by U.S. publishers. I also know quite a few writers who’ve noticed how wonderful, by comparison, the British publishers are.

For a writer, being published by a company such as Headline in England is like “Dying and going to heaven.” Also not an exaggeration. I have letters from a few writers who’ve used that actual expression.

A bit more than you probably bargained for, Ed, when you asked me that one.

EG: You seem to have started out as more of a mystery-crime writer than anything else.

RL: My first sale was to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. I subsequently sold several stories to EQMM, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, and Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine. This was back in the 1970s. There were no good markets for short horror stories (other than a couple of men’s magazines) so I concentrated on the mystery magazines. They were each buying more than a dozen new stories each month.

My stories from that period were reprinted in my collection A Good, Secret Place. Though these early stories were published in “mystery” magazines, readers will probably find them to be a trifle quirky. Many of the stories contain elements of the grotesque and bizarre. I pushed things about as far as I could within the rather straight-laced boundaries of those magazines.

Once I moved on to writing horror stories for anthologies in the 1980s, my short fiction became a lot more liberated. I was able to write stories that have the same “voice” as my novels.

As an aside, I do think that there is a lot of overlap between crime fiction and horror fiction. The Silence of the Lambs is the example everyone cites. But I think it would be difficult to find a noir or hardboiled crime novel that doesn’t have elements of horror. Of course, I see horror everywhere. I think Lonesome Dove is a horror novel. (And it was part of my inspiration for writing Savage.)

EG: You seem to fit most comfortably in the category of “Dark suspense”-crime fiction that is not a whodunit, horrific fiction without a supernatural element. Is that a fair description?

RL: Pretty fair. Thinking about the subject, I find that I seem to be writing three different kinds of novels. One batch has strong supernatural elements: The Cellar, Beware!, Beast House, Resurrection Dreams, One Rainy Night, Flesh, and Darkness, Tell Us. Others treat a middle ground in which the supernatural is down played or merely hinted at: Tread Softly, Funland Blood Games, The Stake, In the Dark. But quite a few of them are straight, without any supernatural whatsoever: Out Are the Lights, Allhallow’s Eve, Night Show, Alarms, Midnight’s Lair, Savage, Endless Night, Quake, and my forthcoming Island.

Even when the supernatural does rear its head in my books, it is usually more of a catalyst—a device to trigger the conflict—than a major focus of the story.

I don’t worry much about whether or not one of my stories contains elements of the supernatural. If I come up with what I think is a nifty concept, I’ll give it a whirl.

With or without elements of the supernatural, all my books end up containing pretty much the same blend of other elements—what you define as “Richard Laymon World” in a later question.

EG: Following your first bestseller, The Cellar, you went through some rough times, right?

RL: Right. Here in the States, my career has never recovered. The Cellar, sold well over 200,000 copies and ended up on the B. Dalton bestseller list for a month.

But my second book, The Woods Are Dark, flopped. That flop ruined me here. They dumped me like a bad meal. Nobody here would touch my stuff for several years. At one point, a major editor at Berkley was all set to make an offer for two or three of my books, but the deal went south when their sales people checked with my former publisher. As recently as a couple of years ago, a possible sale to another publisher was killed because of what had happened at the old publisher more than a decade earlier; one of their people was working at the old publisher at the time The Woods are Dark didn’t sell up to expectations.

The bright side of my career in the U.S. aside from my fans, my reputation, and the collectors, is that I’ve found a pretty good home, for now, with Thomas Dunne at St. Martin’s Press. So far, I haven’t gotten much of a push there—but they are publishing my books regularly in hardbound, and the books are finding their way into the stores.

In fact, the St. Martin’s hardbounds turn up in larger quantities, for the most part, than my paperbacks.

My association with Thomas Dunne and St. Martin’s is the best relationship I’ve ever had with a U.S. publisher. I’m still waiting, however, for a U.S. publisher to decide one of my books is worth “getting behind.”

EG: You’re one of only a few writers, including Dean Koontz, who use humor to enhance the terror in your books. Most writers seem afraid to try that.

RL: Ed, please. That stuff wasn’t supposed to be funny.

The deal is, I like it when a book makes me smile or laugh. I like it when people make me laugh.

My feeling about fiction, regardless of the genre, is that it is meant to be a representation of life. I want my books to give a whole spectrum of experiences to my readers. Not just fear or terror or revulsion, but excitement, laughter, pain, sorrow, desire, etc.

Most of all, I like to surprise them.

EG: There’s not a “Richard Laymon World” literary theme park: white middle-class people who struggle, and sometimes perish, in a world so violent they can no longer comprehend it. There are great moments of humor, of tenderness, of sex, but there is almost never any respite from the sense of dread they all seem to feel. Is that a fair description?

RL: I would add that in my “World,” people are very often the authors of their own destruction. They may fall victim to temptation—or make a simple, grave mistake.

“For want of a nail, the shoe was lost...” is a big part of my fictional world.

Somebody gets careless.

Another aspect of my World: the bad stuff is generally perpetrated by people who are evil—not misunderstood.

And my protagonists meet evil with violence.

Usually the cops aren’t around, so normal, everyday citizens have to defend themselves or perish.

When I do have cops in my novels, they are always the good guys. They are the “thin blue line” that guards the gates of civilization against the barbarians.

A major theme underlying Quake is this: look what happens when the L.A.P.D. is put out of action. Chaos. We got a very small taste of it back in 1992, and Quake shows the possible results on a much larger scale.

EG: Describe your average working day.

RL: My average working day hit the skids when I started to watch the O.J. Simpson trial.

Normally, however, I get up and read for an hour or so. I’ll write from about 8:30 to 11:30 a.m., then have lunch, watch some news on TV, maybe read for a while and/or take a brief nap. Then I’ll return to my word processor at about 1:00 and continue writing until 3:00 or 4:00 p.m. Then I’ll quit for the day, read, and drink a couple of beers before dinner.

It’s a pretty loose schedule.

I might take a day off in the middle of the week and go to a movie or a mall.

I’ll usually work at least one full day each weekend.

My main goal is to write at least 30 pages per week on my novel. I’m very pleased when I go over 30, and delighted when I hit 50.

The main thing that messes up my schedule is travel. I generally spend about eight weeks per year away from home on various trips. They’re great for research, but they sure do interrupt my writing.

The great quantity of free time—and freedom in general—is one of the wonderful perks of being a writer.

EG: What are you working on presently? Do you see any big changes coming in your career?

RL: My next novel, to be published by Headline in June, is Island. It’s a contemporary suspense/adventure story in which a small group of people on a yachting trip gets marooned on an uninhabited tropical island.

It was inspired by Gilligan.

The most unusual feature of Island is that the entire novel consists of journal entries made by one of the castaways.

He got marooned with lots of paper. I’m joking, but not lying. People will need to read the book if they want to see how the guy found the time and supplies to write such an extensive journal.

Big changes in my career? I’m not planning on any major new directions in my writing. Things are obviously changing, though. I seem to grow more willing, all the time, to take big chances with my fiction. My philosophy is, “go for it.” If I blow it, I blow it. But I’d rather take a big risk, and fail, than find myself writing the same book again and again, just to be safe.

I’m actually allowed to feel that way because I know that Headline and my readers are on my side, rooting for me, and eager for more.