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Dan's was a beer drinker's pool hall, had a bar along with the tables. Theoretically, the place didn't serve beer until after noon, but Dan and the guys who came there were real short on theory.
My first experiences with cinema outside of my own home were at the local drive-in theater. I was too young to remember any of it, except for my dad fiddling with the radio to find the soundtrack frequency and that the movies showed were older regular theater movies about to be released on VHS. So it's safe to say that I completely missed out on drive-in culture, something very dear to grand master of genre literature Joe R. Lansdale. Knowing absolutely no storytelling boundaries, Lansdale wrote a delirious love-letter to drive-in culture about a decade ago, simply called THE DRIVE-IN. It became cliché to say that when discussing the literature of Joe R. Lansdale, but you've never EVER read something even REMOTELY CLOSE to this and it's awesome.
The first person narrator and his friends are a motley crew of dreamers, caught in a small, pragmatic Texas town that doesn't suit them at all. Their getaway? The Orbit, the local drive-in theater showing B genre movies meant to freak out the audiences. In a town with asphyxiating reality, the buffer zone of the drive-in offers a relief, but one night it strays a little too far from the world and the moviegoers mysteriously find themselves prisoners of the drive-in, comtemplating a death by corrosive alien goo if they choose to venture outside. What is keeping the narrator and his friends prisoners from The Orbit and will they ever be able to leave?
''Hey, Willard. Take your pet nigger somewhere else. I'm trying to shoot a game here and he's talking through it.''
There was a long pause in which it seemed the seasons changed, and Willard stood where we was, expressionless, staring at Bear.
THE DRIVE-IN reads like feverish 1980s family movie gone horribly wrong. Think THE GOONIES meet one of Stephen King's coming-of-age tale meet a busload of drive-in culture. I wouldn't qualify it of being anything precise. The closest all-emcompassing term I could use would be magic realism, but it would leave out some straight science-fiction and horror elements. THE DRIVE-IN is a celebration of pulp fiction and drive-in culture, of everything Joe R. Lansdale stands for and it reads like such. It's not exactly an emotional experience, but it's not meant to be. It's a delirious love letter dedicated to every lover of B movie culture out there.
Reading Joe R. Lansdale is an activity way more complex than the simple money-for-entertainment transaction. It's an experience, like sitting at the bonfire with a gifted storyteller, like being at the bar and hearing the craziest story of your life. It's as satisfying in the form than it is in the content and THE DRIVE-IN is the confluence of everything Lansdale is great at. I doubt that you'll get the beauty of this novella if you're not well-versed in Joe R. Lansdale's versatile pulp approach and I wouldn't blame you, it's as idiosyncratic of a story as it can get. But if you share just a little bit of his nostalgia for drive-in culture, or just a little part of his undying love for pulp fiction, THE DRIVE-IN is a mandatory stop in your relationship to this elite storyteller.