Book info

• Title Body Rides
• Author Richard Laymon
• Year 1996
• Genre Horror

Ever since the LA riots Neal has carried a pistol in his car - and tonight he needs it. He shoots a man assaulting a woman tied naked to a tree by the freeway. As a reward, Elise gives Neal a magic bracelet that enables him to step inside other people, to see through their eyes and experience their feelings. To take 'body rides'. Neal returns to check on the man he shot. But the man is not dead - he's alive and breathing vengeance. First he's going to finish the job on Elise, then he's going to butcher Neal. But this time, with the help of the bracelet, Neal can look inside his would-be killer's skull...

Thoughts

Neal saves a woman from a fate worse than death and in gratitude she gives him a bracelet that allows him to leave his body and enter the mind of others. Doing this, he enables himself to fall in love with two women at the same time and saves them both from a killer.

Neal is a strong and brave character, even going into the forest to save the woman in the first place must have taken a lot of guts. But there are a lot of characters to keep track of in this book, as he enters the mind of quite a few.

I really liked it, there was a lot of dialogue and it kept things running smoothly. It could have been very confusing with all the body travelling going on, but it all flowed nicely until the conclusion. Really good, a little gory but apparently the least gory of Laymon’s writings, so eeshk!

Rating: 4 / 5