Feral Cinema #5: An Evening with Joe “Bubba Ho Tep” Lansdale!

Feral Cinema #5 coming Wed. June 16 ‘10 to the United States Art Authority in Austin, TX:

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“Joe R. Lansdale has a weed eater fetish. And this is no closet fetish either; he shares it with anyone who will listen. Oh sure, he puts it in the guise of telling a funny story; something about a blind man and a church and some landscaping. Hell, he loves it so much that he made it into a short story. Even suckered some people into buying it.

Course, Joe has made a living out of suckering people. Over sixteen novels under his own name[2], some 500 short stories, a bunch of comic books, and assorted other things like screenplays and essays. (I think the numbers are right. It gets difficult when the toes are involved.) Anyway, that’s a lot of suckers out there. A lot of people who think Joe is some sort of literary genius. The Second Coming of whatever was the flavor of the week.

And ya know what? They’re wrong. Joe R. Lansdale, his ownself, is no Second Coming to no one. He is 100% Lansdale. Oh sure he had his fair share of influences. I once described his work like this: a literary mishmash of Chandler, Hammett, Cain, Matheson, and a healthy serving of Flannery O’Connor for good measure. You’ll see what you want. We all do, but whatever it is, it will be Lansdale.

For my money Lansdale is a literary genius.[3] I remember my first exposure. I was all of 20 and working in a bookstore. We did something illegal back then and I’ll tell ya about it if you can keep your trap shut. Sounds sorta sexy, doesn’t it? Well it’s not. Bookstores strip the covers off of mass markets that don’t sell and well, back then our beloved Mr. Lansdale didn’t sell so good. We stripped Nightrunners and I took it home to read. That’s the illegal part. No, not reading Nightrunners. The taking home of a stripped book. Stores are supposed to destroy them.[4] Nightrunners blew my mind. Blood & guts– really scary shit– tense beyond belief. And it was Texas. Very Texas. Texas practically oozes off the page of Lansdale stories.

I went on to read damn near everything he wrote and somewhere along the way we became friends. Somehow he emerged from the splatterpunks of the 1980’s into a distinguished Man of Letters[5] and is now one of the most respected crime writers going. He’s won more awards than he has hair and people like Dean Koontz, Clive Barker, Andrew Vachss, and Philip Jose Farmer will take his calls.

Ya know, strip away the stories, take away the awards, remove his fame and I would still be proud to call Joe R. Lansdale my friend. Even with his bizarre weed eater thing, Joe is what they call good people. Perhaps I am another one of the suckers, being dragged by the runaway mule, but what the hell. So when is the next book coming out?
-Rick Klaw

In a previous life Rick Klaw was an award winning editor for MOJO Press. Currently he is a buyer for Book People, the largest independent bookstore in Texas.