Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2024 October 23 • Wednesday

Richard Laymon's horror novel Out Are the Lights looked like it could be an engaging thriller about snuff films. After buying it from Bucket o' Blood in Chicago, I started to wonder, looking at it a little more closely, if it might actually be a young adult novel. Once I started reading it I asked myself it it was maybe softcore porn.

It's mostly about snuff films, though not in a realistic way, with lots of sex but nothing too graphic. It probably doesn't fit into any kind of YA framework but that cover art made me consider it.

The local movie theater is showing short horror films that are extremely graphic and sadistic. The book alternates between the real-life murders that become these movies and a couple of other plots that involve a deaf woman who's a successful romance novelist and beginning an affair with a police officer while her more or less former boyfriend is cheating on her with a rich woman who likes for her quadriplegic and once-abusive husband to watch while they have sex.

The novel bounces back and forth between these narrative threads and ties them together at the end. The snuff films get dubbed dialogue and are actually screened as fake horror movies, but of course our heroine reads lips.

This isn't a great book by any stretch of the imagination but it's definitely different and zips by really quickly.

The first line is "'You sure it's not haunted?' Ray asked".