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| Photo by Joe O'Connell |
Writing has become a family affair for prolific East Texas author Joe R. Lansdale.
He's jointly penned fiction with his son Keith, his daughter Kasey edited the new horror anthology “Impossible Monsters,” which includes a Lansdale story, and the voice guiding the writer's latest novel “The Thicket” is his father's.
“It's the way he told stories,” Lansdale said of his father, who was born in 1909 and was 42 when his son was born. “He had a beautiful voice. He couldn't read or write, but he was a masterful storyteller.”
“The Thicket” is a western set at the turn of the last century narrated by 16-year-old Jack Parker. Lansdale said the story came to him with what is the book's first paragraph: “I didn't suspect the day Grandfather came out and got me and my sister, Lula, and hauled us off toward the ferry that I'd soon end up with worse things happening than had already come upon us and that I'd take up with a gun-shooting dwarf, the son of a slave, and a big angry hog, let alone find true love and kill someone, but that's exactly how it was.”
Lansdale doesn't plot his novels and doesn't stick to one genre. He's known for writing horror, mystery, science fiction, even comic books.
“I always write like the devil's behind me with a whip,” he said. “I'm going to write because I like it. Then I'm going to write another.”
“The Thicket” has the excitement of Lansdale's pulpier works, but there's an underlying literary element here that marks the author as perhaps Texas' finest contemporary writer.
The novel easily draws comparisons to Charles Portis' “True Grit,” given Parker's quest with the help of his mismatched comrades to rescue his sister from bad men.
ut, like a lot of Lansdale's work, Mark Twain lurks.
“Twain is my keystone,” he said. “He reminds me of my people because that's the way they told stories.”
For Lansdale that means a lot of humor, violence and no flinching at tough subjects — particularly racism.
“One of the things I really despise these days in fiction is political correctness, especially if I'm writing about the past,” he said. “That's a way of showing you what it was like. People get upset about certain words used. I don't use those words in my life, but people did. And for you to think, 'If I just take that word out it'll be OK,' well, it makes it mean that it never happened, and it did happen. It disturbed me so much that probably 95 percent of my fiction is affected by it. I really hate racism because I saw people denied possibilities.”
Lansdale had more Southern gothic in mind a la Flannery O'Connor than he did Western with “The Thicket.” It's full of crisp and funny dialogue (“That's the way I talk,” he said) and over-the-top characters very much in the mold of his father, who could crush an apple in his hand, bust a belt with his chest and fought at carnivals during the Great Depression. He also was, at least on the surface, a racist.
“His racist rhetoric was about the worst I'd heard, but he still treated people the same,” Lansdale said. “My dad was raised in that environment, so he had that generalization. But when he dealt with people individually he didn't feel that way. I know a lot of people who have the right words but not the right actions. He's still my hero in spite of that flaw. His reality and the way he proceeded with his life is pretty much how I proceed with mine.”
The outsider is well represented in “The Thicket” by ex-slave grave digger Eustace, and Shorty, a bounty-hunting dwarf. Neither is anyone's fool. But there is evil lurking in this finely drawn work as well.
Joe O'Connell is an Austin writer.
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