Paul Kirsch

I’ve been away from this blog long enough that WordPress has changed its interface dramatically, in ways that threaten and frighten my delicate sensibilities. Bear with me on this technical learning curve!

First of all, I have to give major credit to my readers. Nearabouts 3,900 hits in 2011! That may not seem like much to a laughing baby, but every one of you is precious to me. I seldom get to say that I have 3,900 of anything, except maybe legos. My favorite experience by far was when I fought the law and the law won over Boris the Burglar. The support I received after that incident was second only to the novelty of it. Thanks for a great year!

Joe Lansdale grabbed my attention when I read the anthology Steampunk, Jeff & Ann VanderMeer, ed. His story was entitled “The Steam Man of the Prairie and the Dark Rider Get Down: A Dime Novel,” which I found simultaneously horrifying and delightful. Time travel, robots, Morlocks, torture, mutilation, brooding immortals — need I say more? I had crossed his name before, but suddenly I had to know what else he had done. Turns out the man also wrote the original story for Bubba Ho-Tep (included in the following collection). If you haven’t seen that movie, cease reading and get thee to a television now!

Some of the stories in The Best of Joe Lansdale feel warmly familiar, like episodes of The Twilight Zone that took cocaine cut with ground-up glass. Other times he takes you completely off the rails into head-scratching territory.

Joe manages to toe the invisible / imaginary line between “literary fiction” and “genre fiction.” There’s no reason that some of these stories shouldn’t be taught in English classes, and indeed many of them deserve such treatment. In the same way that Stephen King’s work opens a lens to the culture of Maine, Joe drags a curtain open for the audience to take in a freakshow glimpse of the American South during a brutal historical period. In one sense, these stories serve as a loose biography – you can infer a lot about Joe after reading them. Even if that’s not your thing, it still means that Joe’s writing is infused with the sympathy and understanding of great literary narratives. His points of view stick with you. Even if they come from a different, less safe world than yours, you grow to experience the story on their level, and bring progressively less and less of yourself to the experience.

That’s what I truly take from Joe’s work — the ability to submerge in a unique personality, with none of my prejudices or erstwhile opinions infecting the words on the page. I trust Joe to lead me through the labyrinth, through Hell, and see me out the other side with a few deserved scars and kills to my name.

My thanks to Asher Ellis for the recommendation, with a sincere belief that I’ll be reviewing a collection of his works before long.

Thanks for a great 2011, folks, and here’s to an apocalyptic 2012! You can bet I’ll still post here long after Planet X has turned us all into zombies or at least melted the flesh from my beautiful face. The post-apocalypse will need someone to take care of its literature, and I am more than happy to fill that capacity.

~ by Paul Kirsch on January 3, 2012.

Posted in Uncategorized
Tags: bubba ho-tep, joe lansdale, review