I'm sure that it's an arguable point. I bet some felt that Legacies was the most anticipated book in our little community. Or perhaps Brian Keene's The Rising. Probably many felt that the Richard Matheson tribute anthology, He Is Legend, took the spot. But for me and a lot of other readers and collectors, the Richard Laymon tribute forthcoming from Cemetery Dance Publications, In Laymon's Terms, is the book that one that we want to see more than any other.

Richard Laymon. The name brings forth feelings of near deity status. Richard Laymon, as a writer, as a mentor, as a human being, meant so much to so many people. I never met the man, but I feel oddly as if I have.

Of course, not everyone is a fan. I've known people who vehemently dislike his work. They say that the books feel as if they were written by a twelve-year-old. A particularly perverted twelve-year-old. I can deal with that. I can't tell anyone what to like, and I'm damn sure not going to let anyone tell me what to like.

But to those of us that have read and have been delighted by Laymon's writing, the man is a God. For years and for dozens of publications, his work has been the standard of exploitation horror fiction. Many have tried to copy him. Few have succeeded in coming close. A few, such as Brett McBean's The Last Motel, have gotten it right.

Part of the reverence we feel has to do with the untimely death of Richard Laymon in 2001. How heartbreaking it was. And it remains. 2001 was the beginning of the Small Press Revolution. Things began going nuts then, and Richard Laymon was at the top of the mountain of writers that would be celebrated by the independent publishers. And his work was being published in his native United States after his work was practically shunned by the New York publishers for the previous decade or more.

I remember hearing about it as if it were yesterday. It started, we thought, as a rumor. Richard Laymon had died. False stories did and continue to fly through the Internet, and we hoped it was untrue. A group of us were at a forum that was called Horror.net at the time. An entirely different organization uses the domain now, but in 2001 I moderated a Horror Fiction Forum at Horror.net. All of us were hardcore Laymon fans. Horribly, we soon learned that it was true.

Since then, the cult of Richard Laymon fans has grown. Largely thanks to Leisure Books, who published numerous Laymon titles in their mass market paperback line. Many of us, however, had been in awe of Laymon for many years before Leisure began publishing him.

Laymon's debut novel, The Cellar, was something of a milestone in horror fiction. Sure, there were hard-hitting, over-the-top books published before The Cellar. Heck, Jack Ketchum's brutal Off Season was published in the same year. But few dealt with such ghastly situations with such glee as Richard Laymon did in The Cellar. It was always easy to see that he was having as much fun writing the books as his fans were having reading them.

Cemetery Dance Publications announced a massive tribute anthology honoring Richard Laymon---when was it? Ten years ago? Probably not quite that long. It's been a long time though. This enormous undertaking has been many years in the making and I think it's going to be the biggest book of its type ever published in the genre. This thing is going to be huge.

CD customers expected their book long ago. Many were upset, but I never gave up hope or grew impatient. Of course those that preordered In Laymon's Terms had every right to be pissed off. This book has been in the making too long. Far too long. However...

CD was behind on a lot of their projects, and they have made incredible progress in not only catching up, but presenting a lot of new material for the horror and suspense reading crowd. And In Laymon's Terms is now listed on the Coming Soon page of the Cemetery Dance website. I have a feeling there are going to be a lot of happy Richard Laymon fans in the near future.

Like I said, I haven't been in a hurry. I'd rather wait and get the best possible book, rather than have it rushed out before it's perfect.

This book, In Laymon's Terms, is simply a must-own volume for any horror fiction fan's library. Those that dislike Laymon's writing will pass, of course, but everyone else needs to own it. Devotees of Richard Laymon have surely preordered it by now. Those that are new to his work, or those that haven't read a lot of it, should grab a copy while they still can.

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