'One Rainy Night' – Richard Laymon (Headline)

And so my quest to find some decent horror fiction, written when I was a kid, finally took me to the work of Richard Laymon; an author where I always mean to check out more of his work (I've read 'Friday Night in Beast House' and 'Savage', both of which promised more than they delivered) but always seem to end up reading something by Dean Koontz instead. It's funny how that always seem to happen, it's not as if I even like Dean Koontz' work that much...But anyway, Richard Laymon.

I paid a visit to my old friend Amazon and between us, we decided that 'Flesh' and 'One Scary Night' would be good places to start reading some Laymon (and they were cheap, my cash card also got involved in the conversation). A few days later and I'm halfway through that particular book package. In a turn of events that I really should have seen coming by now, I'm also left feeling a little disappointed by 'One Rainy Night'; a book that promised much but didn't quite deliver for me...

The strange black rain falls like a shroud on the small town of Bixby. It comes down in torrents, warm and unnatural. And as it falls, the town changes. One by one, the inhabitants fall prey to its horrifying effect. One by one, they become filled with hate and rage… and the need to kill.
Formerly friendly neighbours turn to crazed maniacs. A stranger at a gas station shoves a nozzle down a customer’s throat and pulls the trigger. A soaking-wet line of movie-goers smashes its way into the theatre to slaughter the people inside. A loving wife attacks her husband, still beating his head against the floor long after he’s dead. As the rain falls, blood flows in the gutters – and terror runs through the streets.

There is a lot to recommend 'One Rainy Night', at least initially. Laymon clearly has an eye for a intriguing concept and kicks it off with a series of visceral scenes that illustrate only too clearly what this rain can bring people to do. The hook is baited then and it was really easy for this reader to snap at it and keep reading. It was a shame then that Laymon couldn't keep that momentum going over the rest of the book...

What starts off as a interesting idea ends quickly when Laymon moves from those short sharp burst of horror and looks to expand the tales of certain key characters. This move leads to people realising that the rain makes people do bad things so the obvious thing to do is to stay dry. This in turn leads to all these different characters going through the same 'siege' storyline as they fight to stop someone getting in and killing them. The book doesn't have the space to spice these tales up so the reader is left with the same scenario over and over again, with different characters that it is hard to feel anything for once you realise they're all just going through the motions. I did like the revenge storyline but the events leading to it (trigger warning for sexual assault and rape) felt like they were there just for spectacle rather than anything else to do with you know, telling a story. The cop blundering round town, looking for the lady who had been raped, provided a couple of laughs when I realised how close he'd come to finding her but he turned out to be more interesting once the rain had got him.

I get the feeling that 'One Rainy Night' would work better as a movie where you could actually see that each character is different, even if they're all doing the same thing. For me though, Laymon wasn't able to give his characters enough, erm... character to make them distinctive and that led to 'One Rainy Night' being an ultimately forgettable read, promising more than it delivered.

I'm clearly not doing well, at the moment, picking eighties and nineties horror to read. Can anyone recommend some good horror and help a chap out...?