Bite

It’s almost midnight. Cat’s on the bed, facedown and naked. She’s Sam’s former girlfriend, the only woman he’s ever loved. Sam’s in the closet, with a hammer in one hand and a wooden stake in the other. Together they wait as the clock ticks down because…the vampire is coming.When Cat first appeared at Sam’s door he couldn’t believe his eyes. He hadn’t seen her in ten years, but he’d never forgotten her. Not for a second. But before this night is through, Sam will enter a nightmare of blood and fear that he’ll never be able to forget—no matter how hard he tries.

From Publishers Weekly

One of the benefits of Dorchester's ambitious horror line--the only such line from a major American publisher--is the return of Laymon to domestic mass market. Laymon's vigorous, daring tales were popular here in the 1980s, but recently he has been overlooked by mainstream American houses (though he sells well in Britain and is published here by specialty houses, e.g., Cemetery Dance, The Midnight Tour, 1998). It's a shame, then, that his reentry to our paperback racks comes with this novel (published in Britain in 1996), not one of his best. A kind of sequel to The Stake (1991), the story opens as Santa Monica narrator Sam, 26, is visited by old flame Cat: she wants him to kill Elliot, an unwelcome nightly visitor whom she claims is a vampire. Sam agrees, slaying Elliot with a stake in a scene that, typical for Laymon, is bloody, tinged with eroticism and unfolds a whisker away from black humor. The remainder of the novel details Sam and Cat's violent misadventures, including run-ins with homicidal drifters, as they try to dispose of the body. There's some thematic play about the vampire in us all, and Laymon's writing is as crisp and gleefully malevolent as ever, but the characters are thin and the plotting is too linear, incident piled upon incident, dissipating suspense. Still, Laymon fans won't want to miss this one. (June) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Richard Laymon grew up in California and took a BA in English Literature from Willamette University, Oregon, and an MA from Loyola University, Los Angeles. He worked as a schoolteacher, a librarian and a mystery magazine editor before working full-time as a writer. He is the author of more than 30 novels and 65 short stories, which have been published in Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, and Cavalier. A Bram Stoker and Science Fiction Chronicle Award–winning author, his novels have been translated into fifteen languages. He died in February 2001.

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