Country: USA
Genre: Literary/Mystery/Southern
Pages: 328
Synopsis:
East Texas, 1933,
Harry and Tom (Thomassina) are brother and sister, young and too curious for their own good. Wandering around, they stumble across the naked body of a dead black woman. Their father Jacob being the constable in their small town, their lives become closely interwoven with the investigation. Until there's a second woman found dead, a white one. Then the Ku Klux Klan gets involved and things take a turn for the worst.
Only our memories allow that some people ever existed. That they mattered, or mattered too much.
Joe Lansdale calls himself "Champion Mojo Storyteller" and I am not sure what it means. If this is only supposed to highlight his almost preternatural talent to tell stories, I suppose this is accurate enough a nickname for him. Reading THE BOTTOMS highlights this dichotomy that exists in literature, between the linguists and the storytellers. On one side, there are writers who try to break free of the shackles of language by inventing new ways to say things, like James Joyce or David Foster Wallace did. We owe them the most important literary revolutions. On the other side are the storytellers, who worry about discussing the most difficult and complex issue by telling the most complex, layered and (most important) enthralling story they can. Reading Joe R. Lansdale is a credit to storytellers around the world and a damn good argument for that there aren't enough of them.
Before being a mystery, THE BOTTOMS is a southern novel in the tradition of Harper Lee, Flannery O'Connor, William Gay, etc. While Lansdale is a Texas writer himself, the style is rather a drastic departure from the crime/horror/pulp he made his name with * and the southern novel is about the easiest genre to mess up. But does he? No, of course not. THE BOTTOMS won the Edgar Award for a reason and in my honest opinion, could have been nominated for other price. It's the most accessible southern novel since Harper Lee's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, literally. It's also a dark and nasty small-town mystery, which is a lot to handle, but filtered through the fluid pace of Lansdale, it goes down like a charm.
Part of what makes THE BOTTOMS so good is the variables Lansdale selected to build his story. First, there is very little of the idiosyncratic southern language. While it's charming as hell to hear, it doesn't make much sense to my Canadian, northern mind when I read it. Part of why there is so little of southern regionalism is that the novel has a child narrator, which also turns out to be an excellent choice. Young Harry's voice highlights the contrast between his violent, unfair environment and the heavy mythology, the latent magic embodied here by the character of the Goat Man. The mystery and the historical/southern part meshes through him. There are small apartés of Harry talking as an old man, which I thought weren't necessary, but not detrimental either.
I didn't understand it then, her being my mother and all, but any time I looked at her I found myself staring. There was something about her that make you want to keep your eyes on her face. I had just begun to have a hint of what it was.
I'm far from being the target audience for southern novels, but THE BOTTOMS just works. When a story is great, it doesn't matter its choice of setting or characters. If anything, this is a testament to Joe R. Lansdale's talent. He is not confined to a genre. Whatever he wants to write about, he can write about it so good that he will find both publisher and audience. His talent lies in fluidity. His pacing is second to none, his action scenes absolutely nerve-grinding. He also has a knack for coming up with great, original twists on classic characters. He transcends archetype, but never aggressively. My favorite character in THE BOTTOMS was Jacob, Harry and Tom's dad who got all entangled in between work, manners and small town etiquette. There is a memorable scene to THE BOTTOMS where Jacob is accused of sheltering a black man suspected of the murders. The way he responds to the pressure is nothing short of spectacular. One of the great scenes I read.
I understand now why Joe R. Lansdale's fans are so crazy about him. He's a rare commodity. I have read one novel and two short stories by him and I don't feel any shame that I haven't read more. I'm looking to the impressive pile of material I have left to read and I quiver with excitement. I have SAVAGE SEASON, the first novel of his trademark characters Hap & Leonard in the TBR and I can't wait to get to it. If you don't know who Joe R. Lansdale is yet, you were probably just looking in the wrong direction of your bookstore, but given that you give a look to the crime/mystery section where his novels are often stored, put him on the same list as Dennis Lehane, James Ellroy, Tom Piccirilli and Anthony Neil Smith for writers you need to try first.
FOUR STARS
* Remember that Don Coscarelli small budget barnburner BUBBA HO-TEP about a retirement home Elvis played by Bruce Campbell and a black JFK fighting a mummy? Yep. Lansdale story.