The Essential Horror Of Joe R. Lansdale (book review).
‘The Essential Horror Of Joe R. Lansdale’ contains what it says on the cover. An introduction by Joe Hill tells us how his father, Stephen King, introduced him to Joe Lansdale’s works one day when he was about thirteen. It’s clear that Hill, no mean horror writer himself, is a big fan. The stories follow, each with an interesting introduction by the author telling how it came about.
Like Hill’s famous father, Joe Lansdale doesn’t usually plot in advance but just makes it up as he goes along. The results are: interesting, outrageous, sickening, hilarious, and everything in between. Here are the stories.
Four young men are driving home after a late Halloween party, mostly sober, and pass a car full of nuns. One decides to moon at them. It’s exactly the sort of thing normal, silly young men do, but these are not normal nuns and have a deadly ally. ‘The Folding Man’ is a well-wrought chase story with some surprising twists.
‘Hoodoo Man And The Midnight Train’ is a weird western. Zachary, a Black gunsmith and hoodoo man, has to do a hundred good deeds to make up for a bad thing he did once. The narrator is James, a young man sold to Zach as a child by parents who didn’t want him. An old man comes in and wants Zach to rescue an innocent girl from a ghostly hoodoo train. Another good yarn. It seemed a bit wordy in places, but Lansdale puts words in an entertaining order, so you don’t mind much.
‘God Of The Razor’ is a scary creature feature set in a shabby old house where a man goes looking for antiques. Our hero finds himself on a rickety wooden staircase over a flooded basement full of rats, facing a deadly menace with a straight razor. Then things get worse.
‘My Dead Dog Bobby’ is about as dark as dark gets, especially for a dog lover. I think I have successfully blanked it from my mind. I did the same with ‘Feeders And Eaters’ by Neal Gaiman. Some horror is not for me.
‘Tight Little Stitches In A Deadman’s Back’ is a post-apocalyptic horror set after a strange and terrible plague. It’s told in the old-fashioned way, ‘From The Journal Of Paul Mardar’. Paul is safe, for now, but not happy. His wife is tattooing a blue mushroom on his back, and it hurts like hell. Then things get worse.
‘By Bizarre Hands’ is another one that might make you feel ill. Preacher Judd has heard about the Widow Case and her retarded girl and sets out in his black Dodge to find them before Halloween night. He has a powerful urge to baptise retarded girls. This is loosely based on a real preacher that Lansdale encountered when he was young. As usual, Lansdale delivers mounting tension, excitement and a gripping conclusion, but it left a bad taste. It’s meant to, I guess.
‘On the Far Side Of The Cadillac Desert With Dead Folk’ is a mad adventure story in which bounty hunter Wayne catches bad guy Calhoun, and then they both end up captured by a zombie religious cult that has occupied Disneyland. The members wear Mickey Mouse ears. Completely bonkers and enormous fun.
‘Love Doll: A Fable’ hints that a man should not treat a woman as an object. All of Lansdale’s heroes and villains are lusty men, quite open about their admiration for female bodies, who often express it in down-to-earth vernacular language, but he’s still a feminist.
‘Mister Weed-Eater’ is hilarious. A weed-eater in the USA is what we British call a ‘strimmer’. Technically, it’s a brand name, but they get called by it anyway, like Hoovers. Mister Harold is sitting watching TV one afternoon when a blind man comes by asking for help. He’s been tasked with cleaning up the four-acre grounds of a church next door using a weed eater rather than a mower but thinks he may have missed a bit. Unsurprisingly, he has. Mister Harold reluctantly goes to help, and the troubles pile on him one after the other in excruciating succession. A masterpiece of black comedy that should be made into a film.
‘The Bleeding Shadow’ goes like this. Richard is in the Blue Light joint drinking beer when ‘fine-looking’ Alma May comes in and asks him to find her brother, Tootie, a no-good waster who lives off her earnings as a whore and spends his time drinking and playing the blues, which he’s good at. Richard does some detective work but has no licence because ‘Black people couldn’t get a licence to shit broken glass in this town.’ He goes to the worst part of Chicago and finds that Tootie is involved with some supernatural goings-on involving blood-soaked records. Lansdale’s descriptions of indescribable music rival Lovecraft’s, and his prose sings.
‘Not From Detroit’ is a nice story about a happily married old couple who don’t want to be without each other. They would both rather die first than suffer the loneliness of surviving. Death comes calling in a black car which is, as the title says, not from Detroit.
‘The Hungry Snow’ features Reverend Mercer, a regular Lansdale character who fights evil in the weird Wild West. High in the Rockies, the Reverend comes across a group of settlers trapped in a cave by a Native American spirit monster…the Wendigo. They are very hungry. A solid ripping yarn delivered with the usual verve.
‘Dog, Cat, And Baby’ is a little fable about a couple who have a new baby and are worried the dog might hurt it. This often happens in real life and is something to bear in mind. Another dark one.
‘Bubba Ho-Tep’ is a classic. Not many people know that Elvis got fed up with his life of drugs, women and hangers-on and swapped places with an Elvis impersonator. He went to live in a trailer park and made a living as an Elvis impersonator, the best one around. He breaks his hip and ends up in the Shady Grove Rest Home, East Texas. No one believes he’s Elvis. The Lone Ranger is there, too, and JFK, who is black now and quite well read in occult matters, which is useful when a soul-eating mummy starts breaking into the home and killing people. This is hilarious. I’ve seen the film, a faithful adaptation, and it’s good fun, but reading the story is better, as usual.
‘Fish Night’ is a very odd tale about two men who break down in the desert and are witnesses to a rare aquatic vision. You couldn’t make it up, but Lansdale could. A quirky oddity and not his usual fare.
‘The Night They Missed ‘The Horror Show’ is about the most vicious kind of racism in the Texas that Lansdale grew up in and features, to be honest, frequent use of the ‘N’ word. This is one where two young men who are not very nice meet other men who are truly evil, with a young Black man caught in the middle. The horror show they missed is ‘Night Of The Living Dead’, which they refused to watch because the hero is black. Better for them if they had gone to the drive-in.
Joe Lansdale leaves you in no doubt about what little boys are made of and little girls, too. We’re made of shit, blood, fluids, bones that break and brains that leak or splatter. We’re also made of hate, jealousy, greed, spite, pettiness and, sometimes, now and then, love. Nearly every story is like a punch in the gut. The best/worst are like a kick in the groin, and they’re told in the language of the factory floor, the building site and the bar when it’s getting late. ‘The Essential Horror Of Joe Lansdale’ is not for the prudish or faint-hearted, but it’s dark, weird, glorious entertainment if you can stomach it.
Eamonn Murphy
September 2025
(pub: Tachyon Publications, 2025. 332 page paperback. Price: $18.95 (US), £13.83 (UK). ISBN: 978-1-61696-446-7. Ebook $11.99 (US)).
check out website: https://tachyonpublications.com/product/the-essential-horror-of-joe-r-lansdale/
