Blending savagery and savage humor
Joe R. Lansdale says that whenever he eats popcorn he has disturbing dreams.
The same thing happens whenever he sits down to write.
He's been having those dreams for close on to 30 years now. Seventeen novels, a dozen story collections, numerous comics, graphic novels, and anthologies, and over 200 short stories, all of it ranging freely across genre borders: horror, fantasy and science fiction, Westerns and nonfiction books about the Old West, thrillers, mysteries, suspense, and young adult novels.
He wrote, in "On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks," one of the strangest stories I know; even the title is a perfect small story.
He wrote "The Magic Wagon," a cross-genre Western featuring medicine shows, gunfighters, a wrestling ape, and the petrified body of Wild Bill Hickok:
"About an hour before sunrise, mid-July, 1909, we came rolling into Mud Creek in the Magic Wagon -- Billy Bob Daniels, Old Albert, Rot Toe the Wrestling Chimpanzee, the body in the box, and me.
"Night before we'd sort of snuck out of Louisiana and made the Texas border on account of some medicine Billy Bob sold this fella, telling him it would cure the piles."
Lansdale's first published work was in the mystery field, much of it for Mike Shayne's Mystery magazine. Then with dozens of strong short stories later collected in volumes such as "By Bizarre Hands," "Stories by Mama Lansdale's Youngest Boy," and "High Cotton," he established himself among the finest horror writers of the time. He continued to write Westerns, as well as adventure novels under pseudonyms, while editing such anthologies as "The Best of the West" and "Razored Saddles," the latter a book combining horror and the Western much as he had done in "The Magic Wagon." He also scripted comics like "Jonah Hex: Two-Gun Mojo."
Until "Freezer Burn" (1999) and his Edgar Award-winning "The Bottoms" (2000), Lansdale had become best known for a series of mystery novels begun in 1990 with "Savage Season." These six novels feature Hap Collins, a white-trash heterosexual and former '60s activist who seems forever to be losing girlfriends, and Leonard Pine, a gay, black Vietnam vet with one hell of a short fuse. Add a few Pentecostal preachers turned hit men, a sprinkle of armadillos, a biker army or two, lots and lots of firearms, maybe a rabid squirrel or skunk, then litter the stage with bodies, and you've got it.
Here's how the third in the series, "The Two-Bear Mambo," begins:
"When I got over to Leonard's Christmas Eve night, he had the Kentucky Headhunters turned way up over at his place, and they were singing 'The Ballad of Davy Crockett,' and Leonard, in a kind of Christmas celebration, was once again setting fire to the house next door.
"I wished he'd quit doing that. I'd helped him the first time, he'd done it the second time on his own, and now here I was third time out, driving up. It was going to look damn suspicious when the cops got here. Someone had already called in. Most likely the [epithet] in the house. I knew that because I could hear sirens."
Lansdale's voice is unmistakable -- a voice so distinctly Texan, one critic remarked, "that you can practically taste the swampy, East Texas pine sap on it" -- slamming you down with violence or revulsion one moment, forcing belly laughs the next. Outrageous characters, outrageous situations. One part savagery, two parts savage humor.
For what Joe Lansdale finally is is a storyteller in the great American tradition of Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain.
And now we have Lansdale's latest, "Sunset and Sawdust" (Knopf, $22).
It revisits Depression times, as in Lansdale's coming-of-age novel "The Bottoms." In hardscrabble East Texas, times are always hard, and the Depression's just another rock among many coming down on people's heads. The setting is a sawmill town, Camp Rapture. Or, as blacks call it, Camp Rupture.
Outside, one of those devil storms that come from nowhere to blast across Texas is raging. Inside, constable Pete Jones is beating and raping his wife, Sunset -- until, that is, she pulls the revolver from his belt and puts a round into his temple.
"She studied Pete for a long moment, then started to scream. . . . It was loud enough, but the storm was louder. The house rocked, squeaked, squealed, and whined.
"Then, except for the floor, two ugly chairs, an iron cookstove, Sunset and the dead man, it was all sucked up and thrown lickety-split on down country."
The novel's vintage Lansdale, filled with turns and twists, nastiness, broad humor, moments of grace. Turns out, for instance, that the constable's mother owns the sawmill and, against the mayor's wishes and subsequent efforts to unseat her, not to mention the amusement of the town's male population, appoints Sunset the new constable. And the thing is, Sunset takes her role seriously even if no one else does, investigating the discovery of the bodies of a woman and child found buried, oil-soaked, on land belonging to the town's only black landowner.
No one -- the stepmother who appoints her constable; the handsome, vicious stranger Hillbilly who becomes a deputy; the spooky mulatto enforcer Two; Sunset's long-missing father, Lee, ex-killer and ex-reverend -- is what he or she seems, least of all Sunset, who, striving to uncover the secret of those two bodies, discovers within herself a free, resourceful, independent woman.
We live forward and try to understand our lives backward. I hope that, given Lansdale's latest books, a host of new readers are coming his way, and that they'll range backward over the long plain of his career, where many rare and special treats await them.
James Sallis's novel "Cypress Grove" will be out shortly in trade paper from Walker. A new novel follows in the fall.
