by Ray Garton

Originally published at a pivotal time in history, the mid-eighties, Live Girls was guaranteed to grab attention. It sure grabbed mine. This was my first encounter with "erotic horror." I'd certainly experienced the erotic element inherent in much horror before, but I didn't know it was becoming its own subgenre. My first exposure, and I liked it. I liked it a lot. I liked the danger of it. I liked the thrill of knowing that within the covers were scenes and words other people would find objectionable, even shocking. I liked the nihilistic aesthetic of it, and it made a huge impact on me as a writer. And it led me to Laymon, Schow, Lansdale, Skipp & Spector, et al. I'd already been a Twilight Zone Magazine reader, but this led me eventually to The Horror Show and the more visceral area of the literature I already loved. I know I'm personalizing this review, but this was Big Stuff. It meant a lot to me then, and it still does.

The plot of Live Girls is deceptively simple, A to Z, really, with very little veering for subplots and extraneous characters. Davey Owen works as an editorial assistant at a somewhat sleazy publisher. Everyone tells him he's weak. His flaky girlfriend leaves him because he's too good for her. His disgusting boss passes him over for a promotion because he won't "play" with her, and his cad of a rival does. A co-worker who clearly cares for him, Casey, wants to start up a relationship, but Davey seems too much of a loser to even help himself accept her. Depressed, he's lured by a Times Square marquee: Live Girls. What he finds inside is one of those places with the sliding partitions (like the Madonna video, which always reminded me of this novel and vice versa). And a beautiful woman willing to do more, a lot more, than the law allows. When she bites him, it's not in the traditionally more demure place. These scenes were and are as effective as any erotica ever written, but have the advantage of also being terrifying. Meanwhile, a veteran journalist named Walter wants to find his brother-in-law, a suspect in the strange murder of his family. His investigation leads him to Live Girls, Davey, and to the whole sinister operation. But Walter's involvement will cost him, as indeed everyone's involvement with Davey and Anya costs them.

This is a vampire novel and somewhat predictable in that sense, but it's also not predictable in other ways. Shocking the first-time reader was the realization that no character was safe. That eighties horror vibe is present here, reminding us that we are all expendable. The lack of excess characters and subplots makes for a leaner novel, too. To this day, I myself prefer small casts in novels, choosing to focus on the local rather than global. The irony here is that Live Girls has global implications, as well. Not just in the case of the vampirism, but something more subversive and ultimately more horrifying.

You see, Live Girls is an unusually symbolic work and an excellent example of how horror literature can transcend mere entertainment to become something of lasting value. Given its setting in time, the novel becomes a metaphor for AIDS—though AIDS itself is never mentioned, there are numerous references to disease and how the vampires must be aware that there are "things" they need to watch out for. In fact, Garton treats the vampirism itself as a sort of blood-borne disease perhaps resulting from rampant promiscuity—witness how Davey is an innocent until lured (or tempted by) the Live Girls sign (and Anya) to indulge in forbidden and tawdry carnal excesses, starting with the glory-hole in her booth. Note, too, the guilt he feels afterwards, when not under the sway of his new master, not Anya, but the blood he needs to survive. Garton cleverly makes the vampires susceptible to blood-borne disease (a device which may have become a cliché later), and flips the whole thing on its head by also presenting them as disease themselves. This was edgy stuff in the mid-eighties, when denial ran rampant and a swath was cut through the ranks of so many promising people. Bringing up these topics while they were being ignored by "polite" society was frowned upon.

Live Girls isn't perfect—few novels are—though it comes fairly close. One could argue that some key scenes are glossed over: how does Davey learn to fly? Why doesn't Anya make a stronger case for his learning about "things" to watch out for? Why isn't he, a basically decent person, more conflicted about killing to feed? There are always places to second-guess an author, but what we should judge is the end result, and I can list these random quibbles and still stand by my original assessment. Live Girls is one of the best vampire novels ever written by pure nature of when it was written and what was happening in that time period, and because its author chose to push the envelope and make use of the its hyper-erotic and yet horrific angle. Perhaps slightly dated by its reliance on a pre-Giuliani Times Square, and tame by today's standards (as Dracula surely is), the novel twenty years later is nevertheless disquietingly erotic and arousing, frightening on several levels, and simply remains Ray Garton's greatest legacy in the horror field.