It’s Hallowe’en! Randy gives his final choice for 2013 – something ‘amusing, scary and in your face!’
What to read … what to read …
What to read on Halloween?
Something scary? Well, maybe “Near Zennor” or “The Great God Pan” or “The Willows” …
Maybe something amusing? Maybe Midnight Riot …
How about something more aggressive, visceral? NOS4A2 or The Ritual would work.
But what if you want something amusing, scary, and in-your-face?
For that you need Joe R. Lansdale.
DEADMAN’S ROAD by Joe R. Lansdale (Tachyon, 2013; Subterranean Press, 2010)
— first paragraphs, prologue to Dead in the West
Honestly, if you are offended or put off by that quote, this series of stories is not the book for you.
And, yes, this is a Western. A horror western. Or a western horror.
Joe R. Lansdale’s Deadman’s Road, is a collection containing the short novel Dead in the West and four short stories, all featuring Reverend Jebidiah Mercer. In the introduction Lansdale says these were meant as his tribute to the kinds of stories offered by the original Weird Tales, which they live up to although they are better written than all but the best stories I’ve read from the early years of that magazine. In the course of the stories Lansdale trots out various mischief-making monsters but what makes each story hum is his approach to story-telling, which mixes tall-tale, dry humor, wry humor, slapstick humor, horror, the scatological and the raunchy. Sometimes all within a line or two of each other. The stories being written at different stages in Lansdale’s career, the Reverend is not entirely consistent throughout the collection – the Reverend of the short novel feels different to me than the man riding through the other stories – and as Reverends go, he is not very reverent: His is the Old Testament God of Hellfire and Brimstone, and he is God’s troubleshooter scouring the west and shooting the trouble, fighting evil, or at any rate what God considers evil, not a profession Mercer chose but that God chose for him and which his past and his native caution keep him from renouncing, and damn the consequences, the consequences usually resulting in a body count. The Reverend suffers the occasional pang of conscience as a result.
Each story features a different monster – in that it’s rather like Steve Rasnic Tem’s Deadfall Hotel, although not a cohesive whole like that collection. While Lansdale’s vampire, werewolves and zombies aren’t really original, the setting, the characters and Lansdale’s voice and humor make the stories entertaining.
Let me amend that statement: I’m not fond of zombie stories, but Dead in the West has become an exception (to a degree, so is another Lansdale story, “On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks”). Mud Creek, a town with a secret and another of this October’s cursed spaces, is under attack, its inhabitants unaware until almost too late that the consequences of past actions have caught up to them. The Reverend, drawn to evil almost without knowing it, rides in just as a dead man’s revenge is about to be enacted. If the opening quote above seems brief almost to curtness, it’s in part because Lansdale’s inspirations beyond Weird Tales include Western comic books and old B-movie Westerns like Billy the Kid Meets Dracula and Curse of the Undead, which he discusses in his introduction. Originally he wrote a shorter version of Dead in the West, then used that as the basis for his first screenplay which changed the story somewhat, then wrote this longer version based on the screenplay; this gives the short novel the feel and texture of the B-movie that was never made, and most of the description is short and terse, which increases the story’s momentum. For a short novel, it packs in a lot of action while still giving a fair shake to characterization.
I don’t often read a collection in less than a week, but the pages whizzed past. And maybe I should have expected that from the writer who gave us “Bubba Ho-Tep,” probably the most original, funny and oddly touching mummy story I’ve had the pleasure to read. (And an entertaining movie, too.)
HISTORICAL (and a couple of Historic) HORRORS:
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
The Werewolf of Paris by Guy Endore
The Stress of Her Regard by Tim Powers
Southern Gods by John Horner Jacobs
The Bone Key by Sarah Monette
