There's some non book review stuff that I'll tack on to the end of this, so be prepared. But in the meantime I'll tell you the review title on this one is from Amazon sending me a shipping confirmation that this had shipped, but listing Jiffy Pop as the item that had shipped.
So, sometime in my teen year, likely 14 or 15, Mom played a concert in Grove City. Given it was the OSU Alumni Band, I'd heard the show on innumerable occasions, and had no real desire to sit through it again, so I wandered next door to the theater, where a small used bookstore awaited. While I was looking, I found Out Are the Lights by Richard Laymon, which had a Stephen King blurb on the cover. I recalled Fangoria saying something about Laymon being generally interesting if mediocre, and it was like $0.50, so why not. Teenage me wasn't particularly impressed.
Adult me, on the other hand, was thinking about some of the novels I read as a teen, some of which I found in mom's attic, more than a few of which vanished in the decades between me moving out and my cleaning out the house, and it came up again. And again, I found myself disappointed, but given the plot was memorable enough I remembered it 35ish years later....
So, there are really about 3 related plots floating around in the title novella. The fiorst one involves the local theater, The Haunted Palace, is showing double features of 70's horror films, with a 10-15 minute Schreck short in between. The Schreck short is generally a disfigued guy killing people in various scenarios, like a vampire, inquisitor, chef, lake side maniac, etc.
Then we have Connie and Dal. Dal tells Connie he's going to the Palace, but he instead hooks up with some lady who picked him up at work. Said lady has a paralyzed husband she makes watch her have sex with Dal. Elizabeth encourages Dal to marry Connie and kill her for the money to support her. Connie, in the meantime, ends up hooking up with Detective Pete, who's last date called him twice without leaving a message. (The date, Brit, ends up being part of Savage Schreck, which we'll return to.)
So, Brit finds Freya, who was her friend Tina's roommate. Brit thought she recognized Tina in Shreck the Vampire. Which she did. Which is how Freya winds up kidnapping Brit and putting her in Savage Schreck. But there are several other Schrecks in here, so this takes a while.
About a third of the way through, we find out Connie has severe hearing loss and gets by mostly reading lips. Which, at 49, feels like it gets badly folded in, since it seems to be selective hearing loss at various points, and only really becomes important toward the climax, when Connie finally sees a Schreck movie (after Dal and Elizabeth run over Pete with a car and Freya dies when the twin sister of one of her procurement targets shows up) and manages to read Brit's lips during the bonfire scene.
I will say the epilogue amused me a bit, as Connie, having killed Schreck when he tried to make her a star, ends up taking his place and killing Dal and Elizabeth by nailing them in a casket together after getting them to confess to running over Pete.
But Gawd almighty. None of this works the way its presented.
And then comes the 5 short stories, all of which are as bad or worse. We start with "Mess Hall", where girl has sex with her boyfriend ion the park, serial killer kills boyfriend and takes her to go kill her in his private torture ground. His previous victims come back from the dead and return the favor. "Dinker's Pond" revolves around a tale told by a miner, about how his partner's woman got eaten by a disembodied head. "Madman Stan" involves a Babysitter's take that she becomes a victim of; "Bad Day" involves monsters killing suburbians. The final tale, "The Tub", involves a wife inviting her lover over while her husband is away, only for him to die on top of her in the bat tub, leaving her trapped until her husband gets home. Frankly, they all read like trailers for a bad movie where they show you the good parts just to get you in the theater.
Honestly, it was fun to reread, but I found my suspension of disbelief pretty much snapping every few chapters.
Now, as I mentioned above, there are more than a few books I remember reading as a teen I can't find now, that would probably disappoint me as much now as they did then, but still stick with me. (One I found in a box last night, and found out the author wrote for White Wolf later on.) Some of those cheese fests included Canadian prison inmates facing down a Wendigo, an alien haunting an abandoned school (the skeletal school marm on the cover looked like my 8th grade math teacher), kids campfire stories becoming real, a vampire forced to sleep in trash bags down by the river (which I found last night!), and one about some Native American god keeping Florida safe from hurricanes until they piss him off.
