Richard Laymon (01.14.1947 - 02.14.2001)

Richard Laymon, an American master of horror, passed away on February 14th, 2001 from a sudden heart attack at just 54. Born in Chicago in 1947, Laymon married his beloved Ann in 1976 and raised a daughter, Kelly, while working as a teacher, librarian, and magazine editor. He wrote over 30 novels and 60 short stories, starting with The Cellar in 1980. He had a raw, fast-paced, often shocking style that found massive success in the UK and Europe long before America caught on.

U.S. publishers initially turned him down for being “too violent.” 

Laymon died on Valentine’s Day in 2001, but new Richard Laymon books kept appearing in American bookstores for years afterward. Many of his titles had been released earlier in the UK, so American editions rolled out posthumously. New readers (and even some longtime fans) had no idea he was gone... they thought he was still writing!

In the months before his death, The Traveling Vampire Show won a Bram Stoker Award. This is one of my personal favorites. It is a great study on how to end each chapter in a way that "hooks" the reader into the next. In 1995, he published Island, a novel that predates the television show Survivor by several years. In Laymon's novel, "immunity" was impossible, and being "voted off the island" meant a brutal death.

“The great times are often that way. In the middle of everything, you suddenly realize that you’re having a perfect, golden experience. And you realize how few they are. And how this one is bound to end too soon. You know that it will always be a wonderful memory, that the loss of it will give you a soft ache in the heart.” - Richard Laymon, Island