Come Out Tonight (original 1999; edition 1999)

Come Out Tonight is the worst Richard Laymon novel I’ve yet read. It starts out promising enough. Duane makes a quick trip down to the local Speed-D-Mart, two blocks from his house and doesn't return. Hours later, his girlfriend Sherry is worried enough to walk down herself and see what happened. She doesn’t find Duane, but is lucky enough to bump into Toby Bones, a student from one of her classes who volunteers to help her look. What she doesn’t yet realize is that Toby is a very disturbed boy…

Laymon does a great job of capturing the scene. Late at night in a seedy Los Angeles neighborhood. The Santa Ana’s are blowing and wildfires are burning out of control. The phones are out. Though I’ve moved away, I remember nights like that. He really took me back there with enough detail to make it feel real, yet not so much that it burdened the pacing of his story.

Richard Laymon is at his best when his stories take place in an isolated location (Island, The Woods Are Dark) or encompass a short period of time (In the Dark). Then the reader is less likely to question some of the outrageous plot twists and questionable character actions that are present in every single Laymon novel. Come Out Tonight breaks both of these rules, taking place over a couple of days in Los Angeles.

Everything that is good about this book is gone by the middle. Sherry separates from a deranged Toby and the book changes directions. That alone isn’t so bad, but Sherry’s actions as well as those of every other character except Toby become detached from any sort of reality.

Nobody acts the way characters in a Laymon book acts. That's par for the course. But even so, the heroine of Come Out Tonight is SOOOOOO stupid I was almost rooting for her to die. As a result, even though there are oodles of tense situations, I found it hard to care since they involved less than cardboard characters that were acting so unbelievably against their own self interest that I didn’t care what happened to them. Sherry is repeatedly beaten and raped by a person whose name she knows and has a proven link to her (he was a student in a class she subbed for). He dumps her body off on the side of a freeway. She is rescued, but demands her rescuers not call the police or an ambulance. Why? Your guess is as good as mine.

The rescuers, Pete and Jeff, are supposed to be ‘good’ characters, yet when they find what they believe to be a woman’s corpse, instead of immediately calling the police, they roll the body so they can ogle her breasts and weigh the option of having sex with her. Once they discover that the ‘corpse’ is still alive, they consider ways to keep her at their house against her will. And these are the ‘heroes’ folks. I'm not one to go around labeling horror in general as misogynistic, but this one skates awfully close (and probably has crossed the line).

In fact Toby was the most believable and realistic character in the book. Often in thrillers the villain is more interesting than the hero, but here he is the only character whose actions seem to stem from his situation.

Add to that unneeded and ill-advised politics (which was a bad idea considering the guys that are Rush Limbaugh ditto-heads are the same ones that were considering keeping Sherry trapped at their house) and a clumsy rant about gun rights (which is ironic considering that the gun is immediately taken by the bad guy and used against the owner) and you have a train-wreck of a book.

Man, for all his bad qualities, I wouldn't suggest you skip Richard Laymon, but buddy, don't start with Come Out Tonight. ( )

http://www.sfreader.com/read_review.asp?ID=180 ( )