The Jiffy Pop Book

 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. 

I said medium well, not half baked....

So, at one of the used books sales I've been frequenting, I stumbled across Richard Laymon's The Stake. Having read a few of his other novels, I thought, "Hey, I know they're the literary equivalent of a bag of chips, why not?", and then firmly got the regrets upon reading it.

Laymon, back in the days I was still reading Fangoria magazine every month was famous/notorious in their pages for writing stuff that was a step above the Zebra imprint supermarket horror, but not quite good enough to be considered a classic writer. (Let me add here, that while most of the horror available at Krogers was indeed forgettable and pulpy, there were a few that I still own and occasionally re-read. Lisa W. Cantrell being one of them.) Indeed, the first book I read by him, Out Are the Lights, held my attention fairly well until the horrendously silly ending, that revolved around a deaf character being able to read lips perfectly on a movie screen. But, we're not discussing that one at the moment, even as much as I want to get another copy of that travesty.

The Stake's cover claims it to be "A novel of the supernatural" and even has a Stephen King blurb on it. The former is a misnomer, and the latter is proof that King was willing to blurb for anyone in the 80's.A reviewer on goodreads refers to this one as the novel where Laymon learned to pad out the length. This is also pretty true, particularly given the subplot that gets introduced in the last third and gets wrapped up with a Deus ex machina at the very end.

Anyway.

The book starts with our hero, a midlist splatterpunk author named Lawrence Dunbar and his wife Jean, out exploring ghost towns on the California/Nevada border with friends and neighbors Peter and Barbara. They wind up in a real one, Sagebrush Flat, which dried up in the late 1960's. The town is in disrepair, although the hotel has a new padlocked hasp on the front door. Being drunk and needing to advance the plot, the couples break in to the hotel to explore. Climbing the stairs, Barbara falls through, and Peter, getting under them in the basement, finds a coffin with a teenage girl. Said Girl has a stake through her heart, is surrounded by garlic cloves, and has a crucifix standing watch over her rest.

The couples leave in a hurry. Pete and Larry, though, later on decide to go back and get the body.

That comes later. First, we meet Larry and Jean's daughter, Lane. Lane, who's in High School, has what passed for typical teen issues in the era. Her boyfriend is interested in one thing, and she has a crush on her English teacher, Hal Kramer.

Before Larry and Pete return to Sagebrush Flats, we get a brief glimpse of Mr. Kramer, and his "friend", who happens to be Lane's classmate Jessica. That he's made her his friend through the use of razors and threats of murder isn't important until later.

The boys go get the body while the wives are out of town. While exploring the desert around the town, they find a skinned coyote that someone was obviously eating for dinner.

The corpse winds up in Larry's garage attic, as Larry and Pete decide to make a Amityville Horror style true story book out of the vampire in the desert. Larry starts dreaming about the corpse, seeing her as if she was alive. She keeps making him promises if he'll take the stake out.

Oh yeah, in case I forgot to mention it, Larry spends most of the book obsessing about the women in his life who aren't his wife.

Eventually, Larry finds out the girl's name was Bonnie, and she'd been Homecoming Spirit Queen in 1968. Kramer, in the meantime kills Jessica and her parents, sets their house on fire, and then prepares to make Lane his next "friend". Lane, oblivious to most of this, is doing things to intentionally draw his attention to herself.

And finally, late in the book, we meet Uriah, the one who staked Bonnie and her friends in 1968 and buried most of them under the hotel basement floor. He feels he's on a mission from God to eliminate Satan's vampiric spawn, although we're mostly left to wonder is he's insane or not.

All of this comes to a head in the literary equivalent of Prom in a teen movie. Everyone winds up coming over for dinner.

It's not a particularly badly written book, it just feels as if there's a better book just waiting to be chiseled out of the slab of words as presented. It would have also helped on my end, as a reader in 2017, if any of the characters had been better developed. I mean, we get to know Larry, and we get to know Lane, but everyone else seems like a paper doll, standing there waiting to be interacted with. And, much like Stephen King's early work, the plot doesn't actually do much until the last 50 pages or so.

If you're wanting something that will hold your attention but not really require much thought, give Laymon a try.