Rating:  Summary: What's the appeal? Review: Man, this is the fourth or fifth Laymon book I have read. I get his style: very circuitous "action", cheap thrills, anti-heroes. Okay, I get it. Here's the problem with that formula with this book. Very much like "the Traveling Vampire Show" (hailed by fans as his greatest work and man that book just stunk!) In "Bite" the main characters just go round and round doing absolutely nothing. I Swear Laymon wrote for three pages about one character getting dressed! The thrills are just not here. Very little action. And the characters... Yes, I get the "anti-hero" thing. But Laymon just can't make you care. Look at piece like Pulp Fiction. Sure, we don't like the things the characters do or their ideals. But we LOVE the characters themselves. The characters in this book are SO annoying. And the male lead is just pathetic! The female lead just leads him around, making him risk his life over and over. She gets him hurt over and over and he just takes it all and tells here how "brave" she is. Man, even a dog knows not to go into the same spot after getting kicked enough. I started reading Laymon with "Loathsome Night in October". That's a book. Messed up characters but you LIKE them. The action in simple (like all Laymon books) but he keeps it INTERESTING. And the cheap thrills are plentiful. I swear this is one of the three worst books I have ever read.
Rating:  Summary: Great Book!!! Review: I bought this book after looking up reviews on books and suggestion on some good books. this was listed as a really good book so i picked it up at a used book store. i read the first chapeter of each book to find out which to read first this one hooked me from the start. The middle got kinda slow but once i got threw that part it caught up quikly GREAT boook suggest if you are looking for a good book pick this up.
Rating:  Summary: Sam's about to discover a whole other world... Review: His girlfriend, Cat, has just showed up at his doorstep. She wants him to kill her new "midnight love", Elliot. She claims he is a vampire.
Skeptical, though unsure why his old flame would lie to him, Sam goes along. He finds out that, indeed, Elliot is a vampire--but that revelation is only the beginning for the pair, as they are about to embark on a wild, thrilling, terrifying, and dangerous night, with death lurking around every bend.
Richard Laymon is (was) one of the most suspensful writers out there. He crafts novels that, if they aren't of the highest quality, will at the very least keep you on the edge of your seat. "Bite" is no exception. Though not a classic horror novel (though Laymon was capable of writing those; check out "Travelling Vampire Show" if you doubt me), it is indeed a thrilling ride, and will be an enjoyable read for the summer, fall, winter, spring, or anytime you decide to open it up.
Rating:  Summary: unfortunately this book "bites" Review: This book had an OK beginning and a good ending. Everything in between was pretty bad. I've read a few novels by Laymon now and this is the first one that I thought was really bad. The dialogue (as other people have said) is terrible. Some of the conversations between the main characters are redundant and unrealistic. The plot of the novel isn't terrible but it isn't great either. I wouldn't recommend this novel. It was not an enjoyable read. It just goes to show that you really can't judge a book by its cover.
Rating:  Summary: Wordy and tiresome Review: I agree with Emeric1's review. The tedious dialogue continued throughout the book, and the two main characters were not very intelligent. Not recommended, read a Saberhagen book instead!
Rating:  Summary: It Bites Review: It's been a while since I've read a "vampire" story. I've read several of Anne Rice's excellent books, and of course everything Stephen King has written set in Salem's Lot. Given the excellence of the aforementioned books any author trying to write a vampire story has much to measure up to. Unfortunately this tongue-in-cheek effort by Richard Laymon makes little effort to be excellent, and is instead a weird combination of coincidences with a fair amount of sex and more than a little perversion. I was intrigued by the story line, and kept thinking the author was going to really turn this story into something, but instead the bulk of the story is a running chase between a psycho by the ironic name of Snow White and the two principal characters, Sam and Cat (Catherine).There is a knock on Sam's door one night, and there is the girl he has loved his whole life standing in the door in a robe asking for him to come with her. Sam quickly finds he has landed in his own version of "Blue Velvet," standing in a closet waiting for a vampire with the fearsome name of Elliot to show up. Elliot is staked reasonably quickly and our murderers now have to dispose of him. I say him because he's a vampire, and as we all know, vampires may not be dead even when you think they are. Sam and Cat make a mess of getting Elliot into Cat's car, spending a fair amount of time on the details of how messy they got and cleaning everything up. In a way, all this action is still background for the story. Sam and Cat then take off into the desert to go find a place to get rid of Elliot. Coincidence number one happens when they have a blowout, which may have been a gunshot, and run into a big guy by the name of Snow White. White states that he was forced off the highway by a gunshot. Through a series of not too smart actions, Elliot finds out that Sam and Cat have a vampire in the trunk of their car. Elliot volunteers to help them get rid of the vampire. As if this book wasn't already weird enough, it gets even weirder. Sam and Cat try to get away from White while in the area of Inyokern and Ridgecrest, California, and actually make it, zipping through Trona (which really does have quite an odor to it - I've been there) toward Death Valley. White catches up with them by using a van driven by two teenagers that he kidnapped. From this point forward the book is cat and mouse between the five characters until the end of the story, which I'll not reveal in any more detail, except to say that the violence and sex are taken up at least one or two notches from the earlier portion of the book. The primary problem with this book is that Laymon tried to put too much into the book. There is as much sex in this book as there is violence, and more sex than vampirism. There are way too many coincidences. There are too many places where events are wrapped up too neatly. While many parts of the book are bloody and sexual, and would seemingly call for a serious note, there is quite a bit of tongue-in-cheek. Ultimately the juxtaposition of coincidences and overlapping story focus distracted me to the point that I could no longer consider the novel as a serious story. This novel is not a bad novel, but it's not all that good either. For fans of vampire novels this book will be somewhat of a disappointment. While there is some mystery to the story, the mystery is insufficiently complex to be more than a distraction. Read this book only if you run out of the much better books available.
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