Mysterious Press 2000 Hardcover 328 pages

Reviewed by El Hombre en Lowcrats

Being semiliterate at best, I don't spend much of my valuable drunken/video game time on novels and such. I am, however, a feeble-willed comic book junkie. I was hooked at pre-adolescence and I'm still blowing dough on words and pictures. One of the earliest non-superhero heroes I'd grown to idolise was deformed Wild West gunslinger, Jonah Hex. He was ugly and cool, like me. I ate that stuff up. Sadly, the Jonah Hex series was cancelled in favour of the ill-conceived Hex series, in which Jonah is plucked from the untamed frontier and dumped into a post apocalyptic wasteland. It was your basic fish out of water story, and I'm only admitting now to myself how much I enjoyed it. Yes, I know I just said it was ill-conceived, and it was, but Jonah was still cool and ugly regardless of surroundings. Inevitably, Hex was cancelled and I thought I'd seen the last of his scarred mug. Then, in 1993, Vertigo, DC's mature line of comics, published Jonah Hex: Two-Gun Mojo. What the hell is this?!? Circus freaks? Zombies? Holy crap, this is great! The art, which was pencilled by Timothy Truman and inked by Sam Glanzman, was not at all what I was used to at the time, but was serendipitously appropriate for the story. This was dirty, homely, yellow-toothed western storytelling, and the drawings complimented it perfectly. No Dale Evans here. Jonah Hex: Two-Gun Mojo was followed up by Jonah Hex: Riders of the Worm and Such, an even more bizarre tale that garnered some unwanted legal attention from the creepy musical Winter Brothers, and finally Jonah Hex: Shadows West. Each series was drawn by the same art team, and written by Joe R. Lansdale.

Some time after that, I was looking for a paperback to occupy my spare time on a canoe trip. The name Joe R. Lansdale leapt across the bookstore at me, and I picked up my first Hap Collins and Leonard Pine novel, Bad Chili. A solid read, but without the peculiar tilt of the Jonah Hex comics. I picked up Rumble Tumble, Hap and Leonard's next adventure. Again, it was entertaining, but still missing some element of weird I'd fallen in love with in the comics.

Having recently finished Lansdale's most recent work, The Bottoms, I can say safely he's found his weird again. This is a yarn of serial murder and racial inequity in the dirty Thirties, seen through the eyes of an eleven-year-old boy and spun from the mouth of a bed-ridden senior citizen. From a storytelling perspective, Lansdale manages to convincingly convey the youngster's naiveté and fantasy while never losing the feel of an oldster telling an old tale. Lansdale turns a phrase as only a Texan could, and his odd characters are uniquely rendered. The following is the introduction of Uncle Pharoh and Pig Jesse:

There's also some era-appropriate language, so if you are skittish when faced with the "n-word" this may not be the book for you. A snippet of barbershop talk serves as evidence to this fact, "Some nigger. Ain't you listenin'. No nigger in particular. Just a hypothetical nigger. And this here nigger, to lighten his load with the law…"

In The Bottoms, Harry Crane tells you his coming of age story. Lost in the bottoms, a wooded area along the Sabine river populated by squirrels, ticks, mosquitoes, water moccasins, and some very odd characters, Harry and his sister Tom find themselves fleeing a shadowy figure they believe is the mythical Goat Man. In the course of their escape, they discover the mutilated body of a black woman tied up and cut amongst the sharp, thick brambles. Thus begins two years of investigation by Harry and his constable/barber/farmer father into a series of killings.

One of the most interesting subplots in The Bottoms is the racial relations in East Texas at the time. Lansdale creates a profound sense of frustration, as nobody but the Crane family cares to stop a serial killer that only preys on black prostitutes. Some criticism could be levelled at Lansdale for creating a white hero to help the "helpless" blacks. However, given the tension between the races, and the ever-present threat of KKK intervention, a black investigator would've found this investigation not only more difficult, but more than likely suicidal. It would've been a completely different story, and I really enjoyed this story.

Hopefully Lansdale sticks to and continues to develop this style of writing. Where the Hap Collins and Leonard Pine books were comparable to excellent TV movies, The Bottoms has the feel of a major motion picture. If Lansdale ever does feel the need to regress, I hope he teams with Truman and Glanzman to dust off my favourite scar-faced gunslinger for another round of strangeness.

This review was based on the advance copy of The Bottoms.