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Irregular Joe
Nacogdoches’ Joe R. Lansdale has won loyal fans with his twisted horror stories. So why has he quit writing them? The answer is a mystery.
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But he persisted, cranking out formula plots and doggedly submitting them to magazines and book publishers. In 1981 he sold his first novel, a nerve-jangling police thriller called Act of Love, but quickly homed in on the burgeoning horror industry. “Stephen King’s first few books had exploded in popularity,” he says, “and suddenly there was an acknowledged horror genre. And it was a paying genre too.” The subject piqued his Poe-like imagination, although he speculates that some ideas sprang from a less fanciful source: “When the bank account got lower than a snake, we would rent a cheap video and my wife would make a huge batch of popcorn. Every time I ate that popcorn I had wild, whacked-out dreams. I don’t know—maybe it was the grease.” His writing achieved an element of self-preservation as well: “If I was working on an idea, I dreamed it all the time. But once I wrote it down, it lost its grip on me.” He went on to win legions of fans with short stories like “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back,” which combines the themes of tattooing as sadism and roses as predators, and “On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert With Dead Folks,” which pays sick tribute to Amarillo’s Cadillac Ranch. Eventually word spread among editors that he was a seasoned and reliable contributor. (In fact, he hooked up with his current agent, Jimmy Vines of New York, after Vines wrote him a fan letter.) In time he began receiving offers for screenplays, teleplays, and much more. “There’s tons of stuff I don’t do,” he says. “Either I don’t want to or I don’t have the time.”
Since then, Lansdale says, “I’ve been lucky. Most of my reviews are good.” But that is in part because most of his reviews over the past fifteen years have come from critics-cum-fans at horror and fantasy publications who, like most of his readers, aren’t offended by grim little pieces that showcase sexual mutilation or disembowelment (and with stark illustrations, they are doubly graphic). “Sometimes people say, ‘I don’t read your books,’ and I always reply, ‘Fine, I don’t make you.’” But he acknowledges, “I don’t think my kids”—ten-year-old daughter Kasey and fourteen-year-old son Keith—“are ready to read my work.” (No kidding. Most adults aren’t.) The alleged offensiveness of one Lovecraft-meets-L’Amour series of comic books, Jonah Hex: Riders of the Worm and Such, has even sparked a lawsuit. Johnny and Edgar Winter, the blues-musician brothers from Beaumont, are suing publisher DC Comics, Lansdale, and his illustrators for defamation and emotional distress because three installments of the comic featured two “half-human, half-worm” albino villains named Johnny and Edgar Autumn. The contracts of Lansdale and his illustrators indemnify DC Comics, but libel insurance and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a New York group that champions free speech, came to the rescue. Lansdale pooh-poohs the suit: “It’s a satire of public figures who played on their own weirdness first.”
Satire or no, Lansdale repeatedly tests the bounds of taste. His constant language tartare—an example of which decency prevents mentioning—occasionally undermines his plot and dialogue, to put it mildly. He also liberally uses the n-word. “I write what I hear,” he says. “This is East Texas, after all. Occasionally I get a letter from some guy saying ‘Yeah, I hate them too.’ For someone to identify with those characters instead of condemning them is awful, but you can’t walk around and be everybody’s Cliffs Notes.” Lansdale clearly deplores racism, as many of his characters reveal, but he also enjoys political incorrectness. For a horror writer, the desire to shock readers is a necessity.
Even Lansdale’s suspense novels, written for more-general audiences, still feature crude talk and ghastly vignettes aplenty; in Mucho Mojo, a New York Times Notable Book of 1994, one reviewer found “something to offend me on every page.” The two main characters are rowdy best friends Hap Collins, white and heterosexual, and Leonard Pine, black and gay, whose past misdeeds lure them into nasty little messes. The eerie rural locale steeps the story in Southern-fried atmosphere, à la To Kill a Mockingbird (Lansdale’s favorite book), and the author’s martial-arts expertise—he’s a black belt with 31 years of experience—adds fluidity and plausibility to the inevitable fisticuffs.
Which may explain why the third Hap and Leonard adventure, The Two-Bear Mambo, earned Lansdale a pretty penny. Though he won’t name a figure, he estimates he earned “more money from it than I made in the previous five years.” The book was optioned first for David Lynch by Propaganda Films; that option has now expired, but negotiations continue with other production companies. But it wasn’t Lansdale’s first brush with Hollywood: The movie rights to Dead in the West, a grisly comic, have been picked up by Dark Horse Entertainment, whose films include The Mask, and those for Cold in July, a Cape Fear—style set piece, have been sold several times (each time to John Irvin, who directed Widow’s Peak and The Dogs of War). “I don’t know if it’ll ever get made,” he says of Cold in July. “First they Yankee’d it up, then they California’d the thing. And the Texas setting is what makes it work—to my mind.”
It’s hard to believe that a filmmaker would strip out any of the powerful regionalism of Lansdale’s novels. He animates his writing with dead-on details of deep east Texas: stale peanut patties, beloved bird dogs, kamikaze mosquitoes, naked-lady mud flaps on a pickup truck. His use of Texas metaphor and hyperbole adds a layer of black humor to even his god-awfullest scenarios (“The river was darker than the shit from Satan’s bowels”). There’s a healthy dose of spoofery in his comics, especially the westernized ones; Dead in the West and Jonah Hex, for example, are frequently set in the 1870’s in fictional Mud Creek, Texas, “a regular paradise—if you were a maggot.” Says the author: “I love and respect the West—you can’t live in Texas and not do that. But I’m taking stories with Western settings a step further.”
Today, as always, Lansdale pursues his career at home in Nacogdoches, where he applies his standard rule of writing: “Put ass to chair in front of typewriter.” He works five or six hours a day, one project at a time, then teaches at night at his martial-arts studio, which he bought with his Two-Bear Mambo windfall. Bad Chili, the fourth Hap and Leonard book, is due out in August, and he has still another in the works. Other projects-to-come include a thriller, Freezer Burn; a young adult novel set in the Depression; and a “big western that’s been taking shape in my head for some time.” But he hasn’t ruled out a return to the horror genre either. “I still have good ideas,” he says, “and bad dreams.”
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