Customer Reviews

Bite

5 star:		(31)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(15)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

Bite is supposed to be a vampire novel. At least, that is what I expected when I picked it up. I've read a few of Richard Laymon's vampire novels before, and I enjoyed most of them a great deal, so my expectations were fairly high for this one. The weird thing about this book is that it really isn't about vampires at all. The main characters have to deal with a "vampire" in the first 50 pages or so, but after that, the novel is more about atmosphere and dialogue between the two main characters than it is about vampires at all.

Sam and Cat were high school sweethearts. When high school ended, however, Cat went off and did her own thing, leaving Sam out in the cold, always wondering if he would ever have the girl of his dreams back again. Imagine Sam's surprise when Cat shows up at his door late one night wearing just a bath robe. Cat tells Sam she needs a favor, and Sam is anxious to help her out any way he can until Cat informs him exactly what the favor is. Cat has been allowing a vampire to come and suck her blood every night for the past year. She lays in bed at night, and he comes and bites her wherever he pleases, always taking just enough to quench his thirst, and nothing more. Well, Cat has had enough, and she wants Sam to come over and help her kill Elliot, the vampire in question. Sam doesn't really believe here, but decides to go with her. Once they get to her apartment, Sam hides and witnesses Elliot having his way with Cat, and they drive a wooden stake through his heart, killing him instantly. Once Elliot is taken care of, Sam and Cat set off on a road trip to dispose of his body as far away as possible. Of course, nothing really goes right on this trip, starting with a flat tire that leads to Sam and Cat running into a really weird, creepy, interesting character who calls himself Snow White. Snow White hitches a ride with them until he gets just a little too weird and they ditch him. Once the ditching happens, all Hell breaks loose for Sam and Cat, and the book turns into a sort of hostage thriller. And vampires never really coming into play again until near the very end.

This book was pretty good, overall, but it was just totally different than I expected. Laymon devotes a great portion of the novel to developing the relationship between Sam and Cat, and he develops it very well. Also, the Snow White character is probably one of the best characters that I've ever come across in a Laymon novel. He's dangerous, funny, and creepy all at the same time. He makes a great villain, as that is what Laymon is best at, making us hate the villain. We do get a couple of annoying characters later on, but everyone always gets what they deserve, which is par for the course in a Laymon novel. This isn't one of Laymon's best, jaw-dropping novels, but it is good at what it does. The dialogue is really good at some points, pretty bad at others, but always interesting and sometimes funny. The small role that vampires do play is all good stuff, and Laymon does a good job of keeping the characters' fear of vampires in the background throughout the whole book. Even though Sam and Cat aren't even sure they actually believe Elliot was a vampire, they are always nervous and thinking about it throughout the whole book, and the ending fits the feel of the book perfectly. Laymon knew what he was doing when it comes to writing horror novels, and this one fits the bill pretty well, even though it doesn't take a normal approach to the vampire story.

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, Snow White finds out that Sam and Cat have a vampire in the trunk of their car. Snow White 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.

"Bite" was the first R.Laymon book I read. I love his style of writing - the way he immediately zaps you into the world of the story and you can't put it down. I must admit I'm no Stephen King fan as I basically find them rather boring and babble for too long. This book gets right to the point and keeps you interested. I must admit it never once actually "scared" me but then again I've not actually found one that does. It did make me want to keep reading though. Anyway, it's definitely worth reading. I'm now a keen R.Laymon fan.

I've never passed on/shared a book with more people than I did with Bite! At the end of each chapter it draws you into the next chapter in such a way that you can't put it down! I've never read a book like Bite before, as it literally makes you want to say - What are you doing! When the people in it do something which you can see is only going to make the situation worse! But, that's half the fun of it, as you never know just what is around the corner in a Laymon book. Especially in Bite.

'Bite' is about the worst book I have ever read. From the first page, the narrator is a pathetic wimp of a man, willing to do *anything* just to be near his long-lost love. The supposed bad guy is a joke, and the multiple misfortunes that happen to the lead characters get boring and unsuspenseful. I didn't even bother to finish this book. If this is indicative of Laymon's talent, Stephen King is a poor judge and should be ashamed to praise this piece of junk.

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 one of those guilty pleasures, a book you pretty much figure you shouldn't be liking but once you let go of your prejudices and let the story take over, it's like a mad roller-coaster ride into the nasty places of the human mind. Briefly, boy meets old flame who needs him to kill a vampire for her. He does, and they spend the rest of the novel trying to get rid of the body. It's a horror novel, though not one that will scare you much, it's a road trip of the weirdest sort, and it's a comedy that is irresistibly spiteful, skirting the sharp edges of madness. This is not Stephen King, folks, this is the guy who runs the museum full of two-headed sheep and stuffed jackalopes. For lovers of flim-flam, the strange and the absurd.

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.

Sam has only had one love in his life and it was not returned. Then Cat shows up at his door one night and asks him to come to her place and spend the night. She is wearing nothing but a nightgown. Seems she has some trouble she would like him to help with. She keeps being attacked by a vampire and wants Sam to kill him. Sam is not sure what to think but he agrees if just to be near her.

Well, the events happen and the vampire's body needs to be gotten rid of. Plans are made and put in motion. It is repeatedly brought up that things are easier in the movies. But little problems keep popping up and strange characters are met on the road. Who they are and their motives is part of the suspense. Events continue to spin out of control while Sam and Cat become closer.

Although a vampire figures prominently in the premise, this is not a vampire story. Instead it is a more typical Laymon story showing the lengths people can go to overcome adversity and the depths that the wicked can sink to. The ending was surprising and original. All in all it was one of Laymon's better looks into the human condition. Check it out.

Well the book was very well written, but the dialogue and the first person narration simply killed the true meaning behind of things. There was very little insight on the deep feelings of others characters. We just had one guy doing all the narrating. The other characters were mere players and you can never know what goes on inside them or what the driving force behind their actions are. The character, Snow White, was pitted to be this all encompassing evil thing, but you can never understand his true motives except through the opinion of the narrator which is not very insightful. Then we had that narrator and the lead female character. This guy is definitely more than obssessed. He's downright scary. I mean, we know there are high school crushes out there, but I have never seen one as exteme as this one.

This book is not a recommended read. It's ok since you can finish it quickly and all, but to go through it all and read it. It's just a waste. I just don't know how big names like King and Koontz wrote a one liner for the cover?

This book belongs on the shelf of a King Soopers supermarket if you ask me.