Bite - Richard Laymon

Boo to whoever wrote the synopsis on the back of this book, and Boo to Richard Laymon for what this book turned into. This book is sold as a vampire novel… it’s not, in fact the “vampire” has metal fangs and spends 90% of the book in the trunk of a car with a stake through him, looking very very dead. This book follows Cat and Sam through a series of bad luck and even worse choices. The choices they make are so dumb, that the reader will find themselves hoping that the vampire WOULD come back and do the two of them in before they have a chance to breed and create anyone else as dumb as the two of them.

Short Summary: Cat shows up out of nowhere on the front steps of her long forgotten ex-boyfriends house. She asks him (after not seeing him for 10 years) to slay a vampire for her… so without a single question he goes “Okay” and they slay the vampire. Then they pop the Vampire’s body into the trunk and head off to who knows where to try to bury the body. But they get a flat, and meet up with a serial killer, and some hostages, and some other nastiness… but they laugh and have sex through all of it.

It seems like this should have been at least an okay book. But it wasn’t… in reality this was a very boring book with little to no action, lots of whining and Cat yapping about the 57 or so times she has been raped, bitten by vampires, beaten by men, forced into abortions etc, and Sam just sort of nods at her and says something along the lines of “well that sucks” and she nods. These have to be two of the dumbest, and most boring characters ever put into a horror novel. And the sad thing is that if either of them had a lick of sense this book would have only been about 50 pages long… and better for it. The dialogue is terrible, the plot is full of more holes than a cheese grater, and the ending leaves the reader wondering – why did I just read that… I could have put it down and read something else… or picked my toes for 3 hours and had a better time.

Sorry, I can’t even recommend this to Laymon fans. The gore isn’t up to his standards… there is of course lots of sex and body descriptions… and I think it is a Laymon requirement to use the word “Rump” at least 30 times per book. I won’t say that it’s the worst book I’ve ever read… but it will be one that I quickly forget.