Nacogdoches boy Joe R. Lansdale is a veteran purveyor of horror and crime fiction, much of it pulpy at best. Still, all that writing has paid off in his latest novel, The Bottoms, which lands firmly in the mainstream-fiction category. Relax, phobe-o-philes—he still delivers a full dose of fear, East Texas-style, but he throws in plenty of literary lagniappe too. In the thirties thirteen-year-old Harry Crane and his kid sister get lost in the Piney Woods. They spot a shadowy follower: Could it be the Goat Man, a local bugaboo? The next horror they glimpse, though, is all too real: a corpse bound with barbed wire. That discovery marks the first in a series of revelations that rocks their scruffy little world. Lansdale applies, retroactively, the serial-killer template so beloved of modern authors, but the small-town, period-piece setting alone redeems The Bottoms. His characters are Polaroid-perfect, and he delicately, confidently depicts the interaction of whites and blacks (one of the many Southern-fried-Gothic elements that suggest To Kill a Mockingbird). Whether you're looking for a Serious Novel or a Halloween horrorfest, The Bottoms is so good it's scary. Reviewed by Anne Dingus
Bill Crawford
Texas Death Row: Executions in the Modern Era
Longstreet Press
Compiling the mug shots, last meals, and criminal vitae of 222 inmates executed by the State of Texas is not great literature. As high concept, social commentary, and true crime, though, Austinite Bill Crawford's Texas Death Row: Executions in the Modern Era (Longstreet Press) is surprisingly fluent. The institutional portraits of cold-blooded losers, many of whom would murder for a six-pack, become signposts on a highway to hell. And the cumulative weight of detail (grisly murders juxtaposed with last meals of "spaghetti, marble cake, and punch") is bone-chilling. Texas Death Row is an unlikely distillation of public record into a fascinating and horrifying work of art. Reviewed by Mike Shea
Jan Reid
Close Calls: Jan Reid’s Texas
Texas A&M University Press
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Close Calls: Jan Reid's Texas (Texas A&M University Press), a collection of articles by the Austin writer, arrives in stores this month. Reid, a contributing editor of Texas Monthly, has written for the magazine since May 1974.
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