Darkness on the Edge of Town. By. Eric Benson. February 2.
Let’s clear up one thing before we begin: Joe R. Lansdale—author of more than 4. East Texas. An avuncular 6. Aqua in the Valley of Darkness. The Valley of Darkness is an open space in the Realm of Darkness. It seems to be covered by a thick mist, and surrounded by twisted. Four Parts: Enhancing Your Ability to See in the Dark Protecting and Strengthening Your Vision Adjusting Your Diet. Usually referencing the act of or being of a person that is 'trying' to be or may 'be' on the cutting-edge of something specific, or in general (very obscure music. Matterhorn nose, and a slightly crooked grin, Lansdale is a big- hearted pillar of the Nacogdoches community, a still- smitten husband to his wife of four decades, and a proud- as- pie dad of two children. Lansdale rescues stray dogs. He has been known to house kids in need. He runs a local martial arts school at a loss. ![]() He offers advice to aspiring writers—on his Facebook page, in emails, in person. When he walks into any of his familiar haunts—the Starbucks on North Street, the Japanese restaurant Nijiya, the General Mercantile and Oldtime String Shop—he addresses employees by name, inquires about their lives, and leaves pretty much everyone smiling. Tim Bryant, a Nacogdoches crime writer who studied screenwriting under Lansdale, swears that his former professor is the “friendliest, most down- to- earth” man that he’s ever known. This comes as a surprise to some, Bryant attests. Once in the face, once in the midsection. The rotting child burst into a spray of desiccated flesh and innards.” And this: “As they roared along, parts of the dog, like crumbs from a flaky loaf of bread, came off. And some unidentifiable pink stuff. The metal- studded collar and chain threw up sparks now and then like fiery crickets. Finally they hit seventy- five and the dog was swinging wider and wider on the chain.” And, just last year, this: “In the next instant Uncle Bob was dangling by a rope from a tree and had been set on fire by lighting his pants leg with a kitchen match. That was done after a nice churchgoing lady had opened his fly, sawed off his manhood with a pocketknife, and tossed it to a dog.”When I first met Lansdale, I had a hard time fathoming where he found such darkness. It was a mid- November afternoon, and Lansdale was sitting with his family at their favorite Starbucks. They were a picture of suburban bliss: sipping lattes, making plans for dinner, and reminding one another not to forget the “puppaccino” for Lansdale’s one- year- old pit bull, Nicholas. She was wearing full makeup, movie- star shades, platform heels, and a pink T- shirt emblazoned with the words “La Di Da.” (A bracelet with tiny skulls on it was the only accessory that betrayed the macabre sensibility she had inherited from her dad.) Her brother, Keith, a 3. He’d woken up from a nap after his graveyard shift and had stumbled into Starbucks to power up before another night fielding emergency calls. Their mother, Karen—the poised, flaxen- haired matriarch, who manages the business end of Lansdale’s creative pursuits—sat smiling at her husband and children. She injected the occasional quip as they bantered back and forth about film festivals in Italy, blues festivals in Norway, Kasey’s impending move, and the family’s decades- long collaborations.“We did our first story together when they were kids,” Lansdale said happily. It was for Random House, Great Writers & Kids Write Spooky Stories. Kasey wrote this hanging scene and it was really good, but they said we had to take it out. It was too intense for other eight- year- olds.”I’d come to Nacogdoches to spend a few days with Lansdale, because after decades as an object of fan- boy adulation, he looked to be on the brink of the kind of above- the- title celebrity that rarely accrues to a writer, much less one who has spent his life behind the Pine Curtain. Starting in the late eighties, Lansdale made his reputation by leaping across genres (western, horror, crime, sci- fi), bounding through tones (from campy to bleak to tender and back again), and skewering bigots, Bible- thumpers, and plain old hypocrites along the way. That fearlessness had done more than earn Lansdale fans; as Steven L. Davis, the curator of the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University, once wrote, it had established him as “the unabashed conscience of East Texas.” But even as he’s won an ardent following with works like Bubba Ho- Tep (in which JFK and Elvis, both still very much alive, battle a reanimated mummy in their nursing home), the Southern- fried noir Cold in July, and, especially, his sublime Hap and Leonard series, Lansdale’s stories and novels have remained niche products, his readers members of a devoted and select cadre. Lately, though, Lansdale’s writing has attracted a broader audience. His recent novels Edge of Dark Water, The Thicket, and Paradise Sky—all published by Little, Brown’s Mulholland Books imprint—have balanced his penchant for absurdity and visceral horror with a style that’s a little more accessible, albeit still happily in- your- face. After decades of false starts, Cold in July was finally made into a movie, and Hollywood is pursuing other adaptations, with Bill Paxton planning to direct a screen version of Lansdale’s coming- of- age fable The Bottoms and Peter Dinklage’s production company developing a project based on The Thicket. And Hap and Leonard, Lansdale’s crime- fighting odd couple (Hap: white, liberal, straight; Leonard: black, Republican, gay), will soon swagger into the big time. Over the next two months, Lansdale will release a complete collection of Hap and Leonard short stories as well as the ninth Hap and Leonard novel, Honky Tonk Samurai. But the really big occasion arrives on March 2, when Sundance TV will air the first episode of its Hap and Leonard series, starring the classically trained English actor James Purefoy as Hap and Michael Kenneth Williams, best known for his work as Omar Little on HBO’s The Wire, as Leonard. But no matter how joyful things look, he never loses sight of the ghoulish lingering nearby. One afternoon, he decided to take me on a tour of Nacogdoches in his Prius (Lansdale has written enough dystopian stories to be a committed environmentalist). The weather was mild and sunny. His two favorite women, Karen and Kasey, were riding with us. Cruising down North Street, we passed by Stephen F. Austin State University, the site of Lansdale’s own American dream story. In the seventies, he worked there as a janitor. In the aughts, he became the English department’s writer- in- residence. Lansdale was proud to point this out, but he was far more eager to take me inside the city’s visitors center to show me a grainy black and white photo memorializing the site’s past.“They had the last public hanging in East Texas right here,” Lansdale yelped, pointing to the image of a black man named James Buchanan ascending to the gallows in 1. Like, one of my best friends growing up, he went to prison for locking his wife in a closet or something, and he died in prison. I have so many friends who died in prison, were killed, committed suicide. It’s a big list.”Keith, Kasey, Karen, and Joe, at their home in Nacogdoches. Photograph by Le. Ann Mueller. Back at the house, Lansdale was greeted by a barking Nicholas. Hundred- foot- tall pines, oaks, and maples swayed in a soft breeze, and soon we were tramping down to his pond, the trunks of bone- white trees sticking up from the water like the ruins of a postdiluvian city. It was the kind of marshy landscape that appears often in Lansdale’s work, a place where Hap and Leonard might discover a sunken van with a corpse inside, or where young Harry Collins and his sister, Thomasina, would go searching for the Goat Man in The Bottoms. But in East Texas, there’s every kind of poisonous snake there is.”Lansdale has been scampering around creeks and woods like this since he was boy growing up in the towns of Mount Enterprise and Gladewater. His father, Alceebe (he went by Bud), was a shade- tree mechanic—a wrench man who couldn’t afford his own garage so he literally worked under a tree—and his mother, O’Reta, held a string of sales jobs, peddling World Book Encyclopedias and flower arrangements. Lansdale’s only sibling, John, is seventeen years his senior, so the younger Lansdale grew up more or less an only child. For entertainment, he had the swampy river bottoms, a place where a boy, his dog, and his imagination could run wild. Early on, his family couldn’t afford a television set, so when Lansdale was at home, he would stare through a window at a neighboring drive- in theater, watching the images of Warner Bros. Lansdale’s father had never learned to read or write, but as a young man he had lived an outsized, itinerant lifestyle, and with his baritone voice he would unspool absorbing yarns about his days as a boxer and a wrestler during the Great Depression, when he’d hop freight trains to fight at fairs across the country. Lansdale’s mother didn’t have such outlandish tales, but she was in possession of something even more valuable: books. He kept a copy of The Iliad under his pillow at night because he had read that Alexander the Great had done so. He imagined a life beyond the Piney Woods, inspired by the exploits of Batman, although he conceived of a more literary variety of heroism.“I think there are some people for whom words are like food,” Lansdale says. By the time I was nine, I had written my first story—about my dog, of course.”Lansdale figured out early on that he wanted to be a writer, but he didn’t know anyone who held such a profession and didn’t have a clue how to become one. He was a blue- collar kid from hard- luck towns, and he partially fit that profile. At sixteen he went to work part- time for the “street department,” cutting grass and putting in shifts on a garbage truck. At seventeen, now living in Starrville, he got an after- school job on the assembly line at an aluminum chair factory, and after graduating from high school, he went to work building mobile homes. College was an intermittent pursuit. Lansdale spent a year at Tyler Junior College, then went to the University of Texas at Austin before dropping out in the middle of his second semester. After leaving UT, he joined a friend in Berkeley, California, where he found employment as a bodyguard for a used- clothing salesman.
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