Richard Laymon is a brand name in the horror field, and if someone were to ask me if I liked his work, I’d answer “yes.” I’d say the same say about … oh, say, Doritos, even if I don’t like their salsa flavor. And now for my belabored analogy: COME OUT TONIGHT – first published in 1999 but now reissued by Leisure Horror – is the salsa Doritos of the Laymon canon.

In his past works I’ve read (and loved) like TO WAKE THE DEAD and ISLAND, he keeps you on your toes by withholding information, drawing out secrets until the last possible moment. No such luck in COME OUT TONIGHT, whose one surprise is blatantly obvious from page 27. Of a twice-as-long-as-it-needs-to-be 434.

It begins promisingly enough, in Laymon’s typical, prurient, anything-goes style: Duane and Sherry are about to have sex for the first time together, but the condom broke, so Duane rushes out to the Speed-D-Mart convenience store for what should be a 10-minute emergency prophylatic run. An hour later, he still hasn’t returned, so Sherry goes looking for him, despite being in a bad neighborhood and having heard gunshots. Sherry can’t find him, but does run into a mild acquaintance, a chubby kid named Toby Bones for whose high school class she recently subbed.

Toby kindly offers to drive Sherry around to look for her boyfriend, and she stupidly accepts. Though he at least takes her out for tacos first (where he relays some bizarre tall tale about getting blown in the bathroom), he soon knocks the crap out of her and rubs up for some outercourse, a mere prelude to the night of depravity he has planned. Although it doesn’t quite turn out as he hopes, sex and murder are indeed on the menu in generous helpings.

Then the tables are turned. But by this point – actually, long before this point – we just don’t care. Our sympathy for Sherry is lessened considerably when she refuses several easy outs (like she wouldn’t call the cops because she’d be embarrassed to say Duane went out for condoms? Come on!) and the implausability grows. She doesn’t deserve what she gets – raped, that is – and we don’t deserve it, either. What should have been a suspenseful revenge tale ceases being entertaining to become needlessly ugly and exploitative – the I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE of horror novels, perhaps. It never recovers, even though it switches gears and introduces new characters shortly thereafter.

It all reads like a much less talented writer trying to ape Laymon than Laymon himself. Sex is usually presented immaturely in Laymon’s work, but some of the scenes here are laughable: “Sherry felt movement under the side of her face. Movement under the fabric of Toby’s shorts. A blunt hardness rose out of his soft lap. It pushed against her cheek as if trying to raise her head. She felt the solid length of it from her jaw to her temple.” Hell, even the non-sex scenes are laughable: “Her teeth crunched through the corn tortilla shell. Inside was a mixture of cool shredded lettuce and cheddar cheese, hot sauce and hot, spicy, shredded beef. She moaned with pleasure as the flavors filled her mouth. The shredded beef was springy.”

When’s the last time you read a book with a naked fat man wielding two butcher knives and screaming “Yeeeeeeeeee!”? If you answered “never,” there’s no reason to start now.