Customer Reviews

Bite

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

I this the first (and most likely last) time I've ever read Richard Laymon. I bought this book because of Steven King's comments expecting a good scare.

What I got wasn't even a horror novel. This book is never scary. It also not about the supernatural or anything else that would qualify as fantastic.

The book presents us with several characters (both the good guys and the bad guys) that make dumb choices and then spend the rest of the book trying to deal with the repercussions. There were several places along the way where I just wished I could stop and smack one of the characters on the head and say "Wake up! Think about what you are doing."

After I finished the book, I donated it to the local library. I feel guilty about that now, because I may have exposed even more people to this drivel.

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.

Laymon has written some very good books....this is definitely NOT one of them. It is so boring that I use it to put me back to sleep if I can't. Nothing much ever happens save the first few chapters. After that it goes nowhere.....slowly, VERY, VERY slowly. There semms to be no middle ground with Laymon's writing, the books are either really good, or they are REALLY bad. Bite is the latter. And this book bites. Now that he's dead I'm sure they'll release every book this guy ever wrote, deserving or not.

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!

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.

This is the first Richard Laymon book I have read; I could never be bored enough to pick up another one.
Laymon in this book has created an unbelievably dense "hero" whose high school sweetheart shows up at his door after not seeing him for ten years. "You look well," she says. "Help me kill a guy."
"Okay," he says
"He's a vampire," she says.
"No problem," he says.
Do they worry at all about being caught when they take off to bury the body? Nope. Not even nervous. Are they committed to this cause? No...the "hero" guy, Sam, and his damsel-in-distress Cat, develop an unspoken agreement at some point that the guy isn't really a vampire. This reappraisal appears to be inconsequential to them.
What is spoken is line after line, ad infinitum, of repetitive dialogue between the two recapping everything that happens in the previous paragraph (despite having been spoken the first time around) and responses from one character of "good idea", "wouldn't want that", "sounds good", etc. to every immaterial and superfluous line of dialogue spoken by the other character: "I'm going to close the car door." - "Sounds good."
"I'll turn my lighter off now so as not to waste lighter fluid." - "Good idea."
Every few pages or so of exposition on Cat's life between Sam eras, Laymon apparently decides to throw in more brutal examples of Cat's suffering. By the time she gets to "oh yeah, and I met the vampire while being raped by three guys," Sam doesn't even have a reaction. He must've been as sick of it by that point as I was!
The novel is crammed with sentence fragment paragraphs.
Like this.
That's how he writes.
No kidding.
The master of overstating the obvious (figuring his readers are complete idiots), if Sam had made a peanut butter sandwich, he would've told Cat: "I'm making a peanut butter sandwich."
To which she would've responded: "Good idea."
He'd have followed with: "It's for eating."

She'd have responded: "Sounds good."
Pick this one up in your local book store and open to a random page. See if I've exaggerated!
Or, for real fun, get it at the library and test yourself to see how far you can get before you decide you don't really care what happens next.
I myself only finished the book to see how many more times he'd break up paragraphs into single sentences.
And to qualify to write a review.
It was a waste.
Of time.

Bite is the first book I've read by Richard Laymon and Laymon has
been a favorite ever since. This is a must read that sucks you in and doesn't let go until you hit the last page.

Love, it manifests in many a odd right, sometimes capturing those consumed by its presence in the most volatile and yet wondrous of manners. Here, it takes on different meanings depending on the audience, sometimes meaning that you don't have to say your sorry and sometimes demanding to be spoken with passions that defy the worlds that emotions weave. From Sam, these dreamlands of the heart have been something he has lived with for a seeming forever, always dreaming of Cat and always hoping that she would come back to him because she was the only woman he had ever loved. Then, in the midst of an unsuspecting night, the knock on the door came and she, the object of all his desires, did appear. Scantly clad and looking like an older version of the euphoria he remembered, she walked into his life and he, a lover loving, wanted to do anything he could to help her. Still, what does one do when love means something outside of the proverbial box, like being asked to come over, hide in a closet, and stake a vampire that has been assailing that perfect vision for well over a year?

Within this book, there are many ideas that seem to work out so well, like the way the vampire, a joke in our society, is approached and brought "to light." Under a veil of shadows, it isn't really explained or rationalized all that heavily, leaving the reader open to the thoughts of whether the characters are planning a murder or if they are removing some supernatural blight from the world. This approach adds something to the mix, a feeling of perpetual horror that looming in the background, and that births an atmosphere of forbearance and gloom. Added to this are the complications with the most hastily-written plans, those that involve a madman, hostages, and Elliot the Vampire, plus the fact that Sam wishes to love and is unsure if love will be returned to him. This makes for a mental storehouse of emotions that birth children named "terror" and "shadows," all carrying luggage that has the ability to broadcast a wide spectrum.

That said, there are many problems with the book, ones that come from the "complications" and the convenience by which these oddities just appear, making a convoluted puzzle of events that harm the movement of the motions. Characters suddenly change in the book, revealing falsehoods that wouldn't manage to slip past an observant person in the "real world," and the reason for all the events become clouded and muddled. Toward the end of the book I found myself skimming pages, wanting to taste the ending because the ending was interesting but not enjoying the perpetual build that lasted a hundred pages too long, and that took a turn that really, really hurt the story in my mind. In one swoop, the point to almost two hundred pages was negated, trying to play with the characters but instead playing with me. And all because the torment wanted to get worse, tried to make more suffering in the whirlpool of paper, but it didn't accomplish the feat it set out seeking.

For fans of Laymon that like the twists and turns that he puts in stories, this might be something you would enjoy. It does have many realms it likes to travel through and it does have a disturbed tapestry of characters for the mind to choose from. That said, I have to say that I am actually a fan of Laymon and that I read and enjoy some, suffered some, and ultimately found the experience something that would have been better to breeze through. Horror, it is here, and love, it is apparent, but vampirism, it isn't the only thing lurking out of a shadowy realm of rhyme.

I've read two of Laymond's books. He seems a bit preoccupied with sex, though this book didn't have as much of that in it as "Night In the Lonesome October." What I liked was the constant changing of the main villain and the fact that we are never really sure if the "vampire" is really undead or not. What I don't like is the fact that mortals are shown as enjoying bloodletting as a sexual release.

compared to many of his other books, 'Bite' has a story line that is a little bit of a let down. the two main characters go through a grusome adventure, while trying to figure out whether the stiff they killed is a vampire or not. Richard laymon manages to keep the story interesting throughout including a chilling end which keeps you wondering what happened. But the weak story line and surprisingly strange main characters leaves you feeling left with an average satisfaction. this book is worth getting only if youve read all the laymon classics first.