A good, almost great entry in the Hap and Leonard series by the great Mr. Lansdale. This one was fantastic until about page 190. It seemed like it was reaching a logical conclusion, the situations and characters were great and semi-believable and then there is kind of a weak 50 page or so clima...
Hap and Leonard are part of an investigation of a couple murdered a couple of years before. The mother of the man is not satisfied of the police conclusion of a robbery gone bad while the couple were jogging. Both had been shot in the back of the head. A devil, painted with red blood, was on a ne...
The two main characters were the real deal, larger than life, and the banter between them really set the mood of the story Even if you have never read any of the Hap and Leonard detective series, you cannot help being absorbed into these 2 hard core detectives world of murder and mayhem. The b...
Holy Moly! What a fantastic story. I am between reading novels and wanted to read something quick for a change. I borrowed this story from my husband's Kindle library because I have read Joe R. Lansdale's novels and really enjoyed them. Well, all I can say is that this short story is definite...
Since a mysterious childhood illness, Harry Wilkes has experienced horrific visions. Gruesome scenes emerge to replay themselves before his eyes. Triggered by simple sounds, these visions occur anywhere a tragic event has happened. Now in college, Harry feels haunted and turns to alcohol to dull ...
I really loved The Thicket last year when I chose it to quench my thirst for a good Western read. I was impressed by how engaging the writing was. I decided this year to jump into more books by author Joe Lansdale, and I thought a good start would be his popular Texas crime series featuring his c...
Three stars' still a positive review, right? I had been debating with myself whether I should give SUNSET & SAWDUST three or four stars, but I decided to be 100% honest about it. I'm a die-hard Joe Lansdale fan, but this novel slightly disappointed me.The execution still bears Lansdale's seal of ...
This is the best of Lansdale's Hap and Leonard novels I have read, and the first I read out of sequence. (It's the third in the series and the fourth or fifth I have read.) Reading it clears up some details of the Hap and Leonard relationship that has always bothered me in the other novels. They ...
Joe R. Lansdale compiles and introduces 26 of his own favorite and most violent dark horror tales in this review of his work. "God of the Razor" introduces the dark god behind serial killers. A martial arts fight to the death between a reluctant champion and a sadistic alpha male is featured in "...
I read The Bottoms by Lansdale and fell in love with his writing. That book was a coming of age tale also. This one is set in Dewmont, Texas during the late 1950's. Thirteen year old Stanley Mitchell is pretty naive. He reads comic books and hangs out with his dog Nub. His dad gets a wild hair ...
The endlessly inventive mind of Joe R. Lansdale whips up yet another batch of stories to amaze, surprise, and entertain you.His new offering covers a lot of territory, producing what may be his best short story collection yet.One tale concerns an East Texas mule race in the early 1900s that prove...
Bill has no job, no money and no mother '... his mother was dead and kind of freeze-dried in her bedroom'. She doesn't smell as bad as she used to, but her welfare checks are piling up and Bill doesn't feel smart enough to forge her signature. So he decides to rob a firecracker stand across the...
"Machos und Macheten" ist ein sehr amüsantes Portrait über zwei Männer die auf den ersten Blick sehr unterschiedlich sind aber sich bei genauerem hinsehen so perfekt ergänzen wie die sprichwörtliche Faust aufs Auge. Im Mittelpunkt des Romans stehen zwei Anti-Helden die sich nicht im geringsten um...
Note: I first wrote this review in 2010 when I first started reviewing books at Goodreads. It was a brief review simply for the fact I read the novel in the late 90s and the details were not as vivid at the time. Now, thanks to the release of the film in 2014 and the rerelease of Cold in July> by...
This story takes you into the days of a boys life during the depression era in the year 1933, in the Sabine River Bottoms a menacing and troublesome entity is roaming 'the devil boar.'This Boar that the main protagonist has to face up and man up to marks a symbolic transition in the boys steps in...
Altro Lansdale d'annata, per me; ennesima battaglia tra ragione e sentimento sul filo del giudizio. Il lato oscuro dell'anima non è un romanzo perfetto. A valutarlo con onestà, anzi, mi viene da dire che i difetti sono di gran lunga superiori ai pregi. Sotto il profilo della tecnica compositiva è...
Hap and Leonard, the not-so-young-as-they-used-to-be, downwardly mobile protagonists of Lansdale's ongoing series, this time out have to leave their East Texas stomping grounds to rescue the daughter of Hap's serious girl friend, Brett. Brett was Hap's nurse after he was bitten by a rabid squirre...
Telling the tautly plotted story of a modern Jack the Ripper's spree in Houston, Lansdale creates a powerful combination of crime, police work, and social commentary--all with an eye for graphic detail. Act of Love, his first novel, is a collector's item for Lansdale's old fans and essential read...
This is the third in the 10-volume set collecting the work of Robert Howard for Weird magazine, covering work from 1931 to 1932, after Howard has cemented his friendship with Lovecraft and even starts writing his own Mythos tales, two obvious ones of which are collected here. One of them, the Bl...
In the early 1980s, I subscribed to TWILIGHT ZONE MAGAZINE from the first issue - being young, I didn't realize that what I was reading was what would end up being one of the last widely published forums for short fiction, specifically of the weird/supernatural/fantasy/horror persusaion. Many ca...
Set in Texas at the turn of the 20th century, `The Magic Wagon' is the tale of Buster Fogg's life as well as other eccentric characters that he encounters. By the time he's 17, his life has been pock-marked by tragedy, yet each sad event is recounted in such a way as to make them Candide-like - t...
Fresh from a stint on an offshore oil rig Hap arrives home in LaBorde, Texas, to find his best friend Leonard brooding over the break-up with his lover, Raul. Things get worse when Raul's new lover is found murdered and Leonard is the prime suspect. Hap sets out to clear his friends name, but the...
It sounded as if someone had a log and was ramming it. It didn’t even budge Tom, who could sleep sound as a fence post. I leaped up, pulling on my overalls, and ran into the kitchen. Daddy was already there, one overall strap in place, the other dangling, a pistol in his hand. He went to the wind...
She was being shoved, felt, and snatched from all sides. Even the women were giving her hell. Pack mentality, wolves with a single lamb, and the wolves were hungry. I started down. Leonard grabbed my legs when I dangled from the lowest limb, helped me onto the ground. &nbs...
Lansdale.wps PART ONE: A Ripple of Fin October 29-31 Evil communications corrupt good manners. —Corinthians 15:33 And it came to pass ... that Pharaoh dreamed. And ... his spirit was troubled; and he sent and called for all the magicians of Egypt, and all the wise men ther...
He decided quite suddenly, having kept fairly good record on the calendar, that tomorrow was Christmas Eve, and zombies be damned. The Christmas lights and decorations were going up. He went into the garage to look for the lights. He could hear the zombies sniffing around outside the garage door....
Not much happened there that is well remembered by anyone outside of the town. But things went on, and what I’m aware of now is how much things really don’t change. We just know more than we used to because there are more of us, and we have easier ways to communicate excitement and misery than in...
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At first the going was easy, as the woods were made up mostly of well-spaced pines and there were soft paths of straw to walk on, but soon the trees sloped uphill and there were hardwoods, vines and brambles, and the pines grew closer, and the going wasn’t so good. It was humid too, and the smell...
Less than an hour before light. Out there in the back-country darkness, great pines on either side, the red clay road winding like a reptile in the headlights, a man couldn't help but feel that he had fallen out of everyday life into a surreal land. That time of night had an eerie quality the sam...
When I awoke the apartment was hot and full of the aroma of rotting rat. I got up and turned up the air conditioner and found something to eat in the fridge, compartmentalized my thinking about the rat to some deep section of my brain and tried to enjoy eating. I took a shower and put on some cle...
LANSDALE“A folklorist’s eye for telling detail and a front-porch raconteur’s sense of pace.”—New York Times Book Review“A terrifically gifted storyteller.”—Washington Post Book Review“A zest for storytelling and a gimlet eye for detail.”—Entertainment Weekly“Lansdale is a storyteller in the Texas...
Saw us climbing trees and doing this or that, Big Guy bending those iron bars and so on, and it was only natural that Japanese-America and Hollywood came calling. This was sometime after we had been in New York, and we had learned the language reasonably quick and reasonably well; well enough to ...
He pinched himself. Ouch. Didn’t seem that way. The craft went bumping over the waves. It made Twain sick at first, but in time, his stomach settled. There was the smell of the ocean being channeled through the top of the machine by a whirligig that pulled the air throughout, and in the beginning...
Lansdale The Events Concerning a Nude Fold-Out Found in a Harlequin Romance Looking back on it, I wouldn’t have thought something as strange as all this, full of the real coincidence of life, would have begun with a bad circus, but that’s how it started, at least for me. My luck had gone from bad...
LansdaleCopyright © 2007The evening sun had rolled down and blown out in a bloody wad, and the white, full moon had rolled up like an enormous ball of tightly wrapped twine. As he rode, the Reverend Jebidiah Rains watched it glow above the tall pines. All about it stars were sprinkled white-hot i...
She told me about Grandpa, and she described him right, said he liked to leave his union suit on and just unbutton the fly. She said, “If I’d known he was religious, I wouldn’t have told on him. Religious people like to keep this part of their life quiet, that and their drinking. Way I figure it,...
No cops flashed their cherries at me. After what seemed like an ice age, I came to the road that led to our subdivision, and as I did, a million images rushed into my head, all of them bad. I assumed that Bill’s killers had asked him a few questions. Things like who he’d told about seeing Fat Boy...