HIGH COTTON

By Joe Lansdale

Say what you like about Joe Lansdale’s stories, call them outrageous, offensive, in poor taste, grotesque, and divisive, just never, ever call them dull.

High Cotton is a collection of Lansdale’s early short fiction. In formal terms this anthology is all over the map, there are crime stories, fantasies, science fiction, and yarns that just defy description. Lansdale country is often grotesque but with an exuberant sense of humor that can take you straight from a cringe to a belly laugh. Above all this is Lansdale’s exploration of his country, East Texas, and the author gets right to it’s festering underbelly, slashes it open and passes out pieces from the wound for your examination. To be sure Lansdale’s rednecks are the most disgusting set of sister-lovin’, nigra-hatin’, moonshine-drinkin’, toothless, no-brain, no-count trash you will ever find in print. They make the rednecks in Deliverance look like Ned Flanders, but take it all as a joke. Lansdale wouldn’t parody East Texans so fiercely if East Texas weren’t so obviously deeply a part of his soul.

The set leads off with "The Pit", a raucously funny and terrifying tale of gladiatorial combat in a lost city of rednecks in the mysterious Big Thicket. The beautifully sentimental "Not Made in Detroit" is a classic tale of a duel with Death. "Steppin’ Out, Summer, ’68" is Lansdale masterpiece of black humor, a miniature redneck epic of misadventure told by a deranged Homer. "Godzilla’s Twelve Step Program" is one of the funniest things I’ve read in years. This is just a sampling of the stories found herein. Lansdale says that high cotton refers to a place where the living is good. The title doesn’t lie.
 

-Dave Hardy

 

CAPTAINS OUTRAGEOUS

By Joe Lansdale

This is the latest novel in the Hap Collins and Leonard Pine series, by Texas author Joe Lansdale. Hap and his buddy Leonard are security guards at a chicken processing plant in East Texas. If you aren’t familiar with these guys, Hap is an easy-going redneck who drifts from one loony predicament to another. His pal Leonard is a tough-as-nails black war vet who happens to be one of the very few openly gay guys in the hick town where they live.

When Hap saves a girl’s life he and Leonard are rewarded with a vacation. After a series of confrontations with pushy waiters and Mexican cops Hap and Leonard end up befriending an old fisherman and his beautiful daughter. Hap actually gets very friendly with her, Leonard less so. Of course it doesn’t end there and our heroes end up on the wrong side of a sadistic Mexican gang boss who happens to practice nudism.

It’s a good novel, but not as weird as its predecessor, Rumble Tumble (really bizarre and bloody, funny as all get out too). Still the smart aleck humor of Hap and Leonard is in full force along with Hap’s attempts to make sense of why his life is so aimless and why someone always wants to kill him.

Strangely enough the British edition is what ended up on my bookshelf, which is what happens when you buy all your books at used bookstores.

-Dave Hardy

 

 

BUBBA HO-TEP
Dir. by Don Coscarelli

Based on a story by Joe Lansdale, Bubba Ho-tep is a simple tale of how Elvis and JFK teamed up to defeat a soul-sucking undead mummy terrorizing a nursing home in East Texas. It is also one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a while.

Elvis (played by Bruce Campbell with dizzying aplomb) is no longer the king of Rock’n’Roll. Rather, he’s a decrepit old man with a bad hip and a very nasty growth on the tip of Little E. The staff keep insisting he’s really Sebastian Haff, an Elvis impersonator who’s gotten too identified with The King. Life is a series of humiliations as he waits to die, forgotten like the other old people warehoused at the Shady Rest retirement home in Mud Creek, Texas. A spark of life returns when he fights a brutal battle to the death with a Texas sized cockroach. But the cockroach is the harbinger of dark forces that imperil one's very soul. Elvis gets the skinny from no less than JFK hisownself (Ossie Davis, yes he’s Black, I was howling with laughter when he explained just how things went wrong after that day in Dallas). It seems the ex-president is an expert on souls and soul-stealing undead fiends. After finding hieroglyphic graffiti in the visitor’s crapper, they know that they are faced with a diabolic Egyptian mummy, preying on old people (which, if you’ve ever watched Home Shopping Channel, is not that unusual). Faced with an evil more inexorable than Lyndon Johnson, Elvis and JFK head for a showdown

Coscarelli has toned down some (only some) of Lansdale’s exuberant vulgarity, while not sacrificing Lansdale’s gut-busting humor. Lansdale’s sympathy for his characters shines through too, whether Elvis is Elvis or Sebastian Haff, his need to regain his dignity and pride is touching. Getting respect from the nurse who treats him like an oversized baby is just as critical as defeating soul-sucking devils.

Bubba Ho-tep is howlingly funny. In true Lansdale style it mixes genres, adding horror to humor with a touch of the Western and a little bit of the classic Elvis movie charm. As a lover of all things that flow from the pen of Joe R. Lansdale, I might seem prejudiced in favor of this film. Well, watch it for yourself without laughing. I double-dog dare you! Me, I’m headin’ fer a peanut butter and fired ‘nanner sandwich, then I’m Taking Care of Business Baby!

-Dave Hardy

A FIST FULL OF STORIES (AND ARTICLES)
By Joe R. Lansdale

This is a collection of tales that Lansdale calls “a garage sale”, bits of this and that. I’d have to say A Fist Full of Stories is better than a garage sale because everything here is valuable.

A number of the stories appearing in Fist Full have also been included in Bumper Crop (another collection that Lansdale modestly considers as odds and ends). “Bar Talk”, “Listen”, Billie Sue”, and “Old Charlie” all display Lansdale’s style of swift set up and punch that characterized his early work. “Master of Misery” is a minor epic of macho martial arts and mayhem, while not as fully developed as the lunatic intensity of The Big Blow, it is a gripping action tale.

Also included is the sixth chapter of Two Bear Mambo, a little bit of Big Thicket legendry (for those readers who ain’t from Texas, the Big Thicket is a damn big swamp). The articles are a couple of Lansdale rants and several reviews from “Trash Theater”, a column that Lansdale and David Webb wrote for the speculative fiction magazine, Cemetery Dance. These are some of the funniest, laugh-out-loud pieces in the book, mostly because they really have nothing to do with the movies they are reviewing (though I REALLY want to watch Dolomite now!).

While Lansdale’s reputation rests on his later works such as “The Pit” or “By Bizarre Hnads’, his earlier work is by no menas to be despised. All in all, this set is a pretty decent fist full of Lansdale.

-Dave Hardy

BUMPER CROP
By Joe R. Lansdale

Bumper Crop is Joe R. Lasnsdale’s follow up to High Cotton. While High Cotton features the Mojo Storyteller at his most outrageous, Bumper Crop is in, I won’t say a gentler, but a less extreme vein.

That is partly by design I believe. Bumper Crop features many of the best short stories that Lansdale wrote during his early years. Twilight Zone magazine was a principal market and T.E.D. Klein bought many of these tales. Lansdale’s distinctive style of storytelling is still developing here. The tales are polished and professional, and not quite as over the top as his later "Southern Gothic" work.

That is not to say these are less appealing, indeed they may be more so! These stories reflect a period of success in the magazine markets. Lansdale outlines his transition to the style epitomized by “The Pit” and “By Bizarre Hands”, it was not a happy one. The story “Bestsellers Guaranteed”, which reveals the nexus of conspiracy theory and publishing, is an arch response to the frustration he felt as editors declined to buy his new style tales.

There are many gems in Bumper Crop. “Fish Night”, a yarn about two men stranded in the desert on a magic night, is beautiful, mythic, and horrific all at the same time. “In the Cold Dark Time” reveals the ferocity that lurks behind good intentions in wartime. “Fire Dog” is a hilarious take on work, relationships, and identity, like something Kafka would have written if he came from Nacogdoches.

There are many, many more tales of outstanding quality in Bumper Crop. All together there are 26 stories in this book, many of them are quite short (Like Ambrose Bierce, Lansdale packs a big wallop in few words). Bumper Crop is an abundant harvest of good storytelling.

-Dave Hardy

RUMBLE TUMBLE
By Joe R. Lansdale

Joe Lansdale is one of the most inventive, outlandish, and uncompromising authors you can find today. His Hap and Leonard novels are a long running manifestation of his twisted imagination at its best. The protagonists are Hap Collins, an easy-going redneck, and his best friend Leonard Pine, a black, gay Vietnam veteran. Yup, you read that last part right. And it all happens in Texas.

Rumble Tumble begins with Hap on the outs with his girlfriend, Brett. Romantic disputes are shelved when they get a visit from Red, a midget gangster, formerly a circus performer, currently a pimp. He knows the whereabouts of Brett’s daughter, a drug-addled prostitute. She is in the clutches of the most vicious biker gang in Texas (or anywhere for that matter). To reach her they have to go to Red’s brother, once the gang’s most feared enforcer, now a born-again preacher and gopher removal expert.

If that sounds like a whacked-out tall-tale, that’s pretty much what it is, told by Joe Lansdale hisownself. Lansdale does not shy away from a good digression, if it adds spice. The tale of Red’s rescue from his life as a trick-rider of dogs is just about the funniest and most touching thing your likely to find in fiction.

The Hap and Leonard novels are a true Texas treat, do not miss them.

-Dave Hardy

FREEZER BURN
By Joe R. Lansdale

“Different” is an adjective that applies to much of Joe Lansdale’s fiction. So asserting that Freezer Burn is different is perhaps not too daring. But Freezer Burn is different from other Lansdale stories. Lansdale’s favored ground is coming-of-age story, his protagonists are innocents who experience the bitter truth of life in a tragic world. That goes double for Hap Collins, he’s a perpetual innocent.

But in Freezer Burn, Lansdale puts a true low-life front and center. Bill Roberts is a cockroach, a sorry excuse for a human being. After a botched robbery, carried out with a great deal of bloodshed by scumbags even stupider than himself, Roberts escapes through the swamps. He takes refuge with a travelling freak show. It is not a post-modern, ironic freak show, but an old-fashioned collection of deformed outcasts.

The show boasts Conrad the Dog-Boy, U.S. Grant the bearded lady, assorted Pinheads, Siamese Twins, Pickled Punks, and the Ice Man. The Ice Man might be a frozen relic of prehistoric times or he might be the Savior. Presiding over it all is Frost, a world-weary showman with a wife that is too young and too beautiful.

Here Roberts finds himself in a curious quandary, he can carry on in his accustomed bubble of loathsome egotism, arrogant and selfish, or he can accept the shelter granted to him by the freaks and in accord them the respect and affection he receives from them.

More so than other Lansdale tales, Freezer Burn fits into the classic pattern of serie noir. Roberts inhabits a world that can be heaven or hell, entirely as he makes it. The upward road is a rocky one, and the higher one climbs the greater the temptations become. The life of the show-folks is a hard-scrabble one where facing down rednecks spoiling for a fight is all in a day’s work, sex may sometimes be bartered, and even cub scouts strut with macho attitude.

For memorable, gripping, noir fiction, Freezer Burn cannot be beat.

-Dave Hardy

SUNSET AND SAWDUST
By Joe R. Lansdale

The fertile imagination of Joe Lansdale spins another gripping tale of the life and crimes of a naif in a corrupt land. Lansdale doesn’t just spin out a mystery, he tells a story about a time and a place and the people who live there. You could say he paints a picture, the dominant color is blood-red.

In Sunset and Sawdust the time is the mid-1930s and the place is (where else?) East Texas. A tornado is whipping through the land and Sunset Jones’ husband, Pete, is raping her again. This time there’s a surprise for Pete. Sunset blows his brains out. With a pistol shot during a tornado she starts on a journey that will lead to discoveries about herself and her loved ones. Her mother-in-law, who happens to own the local sawmill, promotes Sunset to constable. But the elder Mrs. Jones has her own motives, and they aren’t necessarily about feminist empowerment.

Sunset is surrounded by a motley band of helpers: her deputy Clyde, a charming hobo called Hillbilly, her daughter Karen, and a the county’s toughest black man, a giant fellow known as Bull. Sunset takes on her first case: discovering the identity of a baby found buried on the land of a black farmer. The solution leads to a crisis that threatens to tear apart not just the local powers that be, but Sunset’s own family.

The forces aligned against Sunset are more than formidable. She is not just a woman in a man’s world, but a woman trespassing on man’s territory. She also treats black people in an unthinkable manner: as people. Of course Lansdale’s specialty is villains and he provides Sunset with two of his finest. McBride (last seen in the Big Blow), a Chicago hoodlum of the toughest kind, and Two, one of the strangest and creepiest killers I’ve come across.

This is classic Lansdale territory: the story of a dedicated individual who sets out to solve a mystery that reveals a deep truth about the protagonist and his community. Novels like A Fine Dark Line and The Bottoms (as well as Sunset and Sawdust) look at the dark underbelly of greed, cruelty, and racism in small town life. The image we see in Lansdale country is often a bleak one, with few heroes in sight, but that is the point. Lansdale writes tales of exceptional heroes (and I use that term intentionally) who break society’s bounds to right very great wrongs. When a Lansdale hero achieves any kind of success, it is hard won, often at a brutal cost.

Foe sheer, exhilarating suspense, vivid characters, pure-dee evil, and dogged crime-solving, Sunset and Sawdust is without parallel.

-Dave Hardy

A FINE DARK LINE
By Joe R. Lansdale

This is another instant classic from Joe Lansdale. The man from behind the Pine Curtain weaves another tale of murder, memory, growing up, and a certain place in time.

Dewdrop, Texas in the late ‘50s was frozen in time. Through the eyes of Stanley Mitchell Jr. the reader sees the harsh dividing line of whites and colored in the segregated South. Stan’s dad owns the local drive-in theater. While Stan reads Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes he dreams of adventure in his sleepy town. He finds it in the form of a box of letters in a buried trunk. The letters open up the mystery of the death by fire of a rich young girl and the brutal murder of a prostitute’s daughter on the same night years before. Before he’s done Stan has to learn just how many sordid secrets his town hides, and he has to learn what they mean.

Stan devotes himself to finding the truth. Not by himself though, Lansdale provides a rich cast of characters. Stan has help from his best buddy, Richard, a boy with a brutally abusive father. Stan’s older sister assists in solving the riddle while providing some fine comic relief (there’s a wickedly funny subplot involving a “water balloon” in her bedroom). Stan’s dog Nub proves to be man’s best friend (reminiscent of Sailor Steve Costigan’s bulldog, Mike). But Stan learns the most from Buster, the old black man who runs the projection room at the drive-in. Buster teaches Stan about the ways of being a man, even when the world insists you are just a boy.

This is a rather restrained tale for Lansdale. There is a degree of sweetness about it, though there is plenty of darkness to go with the light. A Fine Dark Line is superlative Texas noir from one of the best writers around.

-Dave Hardy

THE BOTTOMS
By Joe R. Lansdale

The Bottoms is a classic coming of age tale set in the deep Piney Woods section of East Texas. Harry Crane is ten years old. His daddy is the local constable as well as being the barber and a farmer. Texas is locked in the dark days of the Depression and Blacks are definitely not equal to Whites.

Harry and his sister Tom, short for Thomasina, like to visit the Bottoms. This is the swampy area of mosquitoes and alligators along the Sabine River. It is a haunted place, the dreaded Goat Man wanders the area by night. Other things wander too, one leaves behind the body of a murdered Black woman.

What follows is formally a mystery story, much like A Fine Dark Line, or Sunset and Sawdust. But The Bottoms is as much about the people that Harry grows up among, the ones he learns from, the ones that are admirable, and the ones that are despicable.

The Bottoms is a raw story, sometimes brutal and sometimes coarse. Lansdale does not pull punches. The reward is his amazing story telling ability and the deep love he has for East Texas in this unique and typically Lansdale story.

-Dave Hardy

FLAMING LONDON
By Joe R. Lansdale

Ned the Seal returns in Lansdale tale of High Adventure and Low Humor. Having survived the Gotterdammerung of Dime Novel heroes in Zeppelins West, Ned washes up at the seaside home of Jules Verne, who just happens to be entertaining his good friend, Mark Twain. Twain is pretty much down and out and on skid row in Tangiers, Morocco so an adventure with an intelligent seal is quite a lucky break for him. Just to spice things up, the Martians invade. While the Martians’ giant, three-legged, fighting machines are nearly unstoppable, the good-guys have a secret weapon, Rikwalk. He’s a 40-foot tall intelligent gorilla, who shows up to warn of yet another disaster imperiling Earth.

Flaming London is another love note to 19th century pop-lit, from a 21st century genius. OK, it’s kind of like a love note from a crazy stalker, buts that’s all to the good. The action is non-stop as is the nutty word play and the Martian fart-jokes (yes, I wrote Martian fart-joke). Homage and parody mix in one of the funniest and best stories I’ve read in quite a while.

-Dave Hardy

ZEPPELINS WEST
By Joe R. Lansdale

When I tell people about the premise of Zeppelins West, they look at me kind of funny. I don’t know why, it’s really quite simple, Buffalo Bill Cody’s disembodied head is flying his Wild West show on their zeppelin to Japan with Wild Bill Hickok, Annie Oakley, and Sitting Bull in attendance. It’s more than just a show since they are there to locate Frankenstein’s monster, who is being held captive by a samurai warlord who is slowly reducing the monster into an aphrodisiac powder. The story doesn’t actually get weird until later on the hidden island of… well I don’t want to give away too much.

Lansdale has always been the kind of writer who blended genres. Here he has poured all of 19th century popular fiction into a blender and then yanked off the lid. The result is less a splatter than a whacked-out Rorshack test where the repressed returns like a crazy, sexy ex-girlfriend, a lot of fun but kind of scary too.

Believe me, this stuff is FUNNY. I can read a lot of stuff that folks call funny without cracking a smile. But Lansdale cracks me up every few pages. Buffalo Bill’s marital difficulties are narrated with an understated zest that would have done Mark Twain proud. The story of how the carnivores and the plant eaters got liquored up on fruit juice and decided on a new dietary law gets me laughing just thinking about it. Zeppelins is a fractured fairy-tale told in an off-color Oz.

I am going to assert right here that Joe Lansdale is one of the unique voices of American letters, a post-modern Mark Twain. If you don’t believe me, just read Zeppelins West.

-Dave Hardy

THE MAGIC WAGON
By Joe R. Lansdale

Take an orphaned youngster, a legendary gunfighter’s mummified remains, an ill-tempered travelling showman, a strong-willed black man, and a wrestling ape and what more could you ask for in a novel? Cannibalistic zombies on a haunted zeppelin controlled by a demonic inter-stellar squid? OK, sure who wouldn’t want that, but The Magic Wagon was only Lansdale’s first novel so give him a break.

Buster is the orphaned youngster, he is an adolescent growing up fast (as so many of Lansdale’s protagonists do). He accompanies Billy Bob, a trick shooter with a mean streak, and Albert, a black man with a mysterious and deep connection to Billy Bob. While Billy Bob amazes the crowd with quick-draw displays and Albert peddles patent “medicine”, the show also features Wild Bill Hickok’s mummified body (his hinged arms are rigged to hold his pistols at the ready) and Rot Toe the Wrestling Chimpanzee.

Touring the South as a travelling show isn’t much of a life, but it’s what this odd lot has. As the pressure mounts on them they visit Mud Flats, an East Texas town where the forces, psychological and spiritual that swirl around them will come to a head.

The Magic Wagon is an intersection of Lansdale themes. It is a Western, and a tale of the supernatural. It is a work of modern fiction that looks to old Dime Novels as a template for fiction and for the way men fictionalize themselves. In Lansdale’s world nothing is ever as it seems, lives are lived on a stage where masculinity and racial hatred are donned like costumes and worn until they can no longer be removed. The piney woods of East Texas are a nightmare landscape where outcasts roam and dark forces are waiting to prey on the unwary.

If the Western is dead, it’s mutant offspring still roams the world like a drifting serial killer. Works like Blood Meridian¸ Little Big Man, and The Magic Wagon let the maniacs out of the cages and into our psyches.

-Dave Hardy