By Bizarre Hands
Authors: Lewis Ramsey; Shiner Joe R.; Campbell Lansdale
BY
BIZARRE HANDS
JOE R. LANSDALE
INTRODUCTION BY
LEWIS SHINER
NEW AFTERWORD BY
RAMSEY CAMPBELL
DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.
MINEOLA, NEW YORK
DOVER
HORROR CLASSICS
For mature readers only. This work includes some violent, sexual, and racial content which may be objectionable to some readers.
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 by Joe R. Lansdale
Introduction copyright © 1989 by Lewis Shiner
Afterword copyright © 2016 by Ramsey Campbell
All rights reserved.
Bibliographical Note
This Dover edition, first published in 2016, is a republication of the work published by Avon Books, New York, in 1991. A new Afterword by Ramsey Campbell has been specially written for this Dover edition.
International Standard Book Number
ISBN-13: 978-0-486-80561-0
ISBN-10: 0-486-80561-1
Manufactured in the United States by RR Donnelley
80561101 2016
This
book is dedicated with love and respect
to Ardath Mayhar
who read most of these before anyone else
and was always there
with encouragement or a wise suggestion.
C
ONTENTS
L
etter from the South, Two Moons West of Nacogdoches
D
own by the Sea Near the Great Big Rock
T
ight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back
N
ight They Missed the Horror Show
O
n the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks
I
NTRODUCTION
by Lewis Shiner
Joe Lansdale scares the living shit out of some people.
I'm talking about his work here, of course. Joe himself is a sweetheart: modest, funny, easygoing, quick to make friends. He's even as gentle and peace-loving as you could hope for in a six-foot, 180-pound former karate instructor with more black belts than he has shoes.
No, the problem comes from these stories he keeps writing. They get great rejection letters from top editors in the field. People love his writing, his dialogue, his sense of place, but they can't quite bring themselves to publish him. They invite him into anthologies and then when they read what he sends them, they ask him to leave quietly and please not break anything on the way out.
I know how they feel. I bought a story from Joe myself, "I Tell You It's Love," and it didn't scare me, exactly, but it made me very damned uncomfortable.
So what is it about these stories? What kind of stories
are
they, exactly?
People have been trying for years to explain what kind of writer Joe is. They've compared him to Clive Barker, which I don't really see. Barker is best known for the explicit violence of his work, and yes, Joe's done that. But Joe has never spilled a quart of blood without good and sufficient reason. The violence in Joe's stories is not there for its own sake, but as a natural outgrowth of the characters.
He's been compared to Barry Hannah, a master of voice and atmosphere. Joe does that too, with the best of them, vii
but
he hooks that voice and atmosphere to a story engine that just won't quit.
He's been compared to Mark Twain, which comes closer than any of the others. Twain was a stylist, a storyteller, and a social critic. He wrote for literature professors as well as the barely literate. Even so, Twain never disappeared from his work as thoroughly as Joe does, leaving only the naked voice of another, infinitely strange human mind.
If we can't pin Joe down as a writer, how about putting the stories themselves into categories? After all he is one of the brightest lights of modern horror fiction, part of this new "splatterpunk" business we keep hearing about. Right?
Wrong. Joe at his best, as he is in this book, doesn't properly fit in anywhere. "Night They Missed the Horror Show" reads like a horror story, but there's nothing supernatural about it. Likewise "The Steel Valentine" (one of two stories original to this anthology) and "The Pit." ''Duck Hunt'' is a similar exercise in realistic horror, except its most obvious inspiration is the animated cartoon.
"Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back" is neither quite S/F nor quite fantasy; "Trains Not Taken" is not quite a western; and ''Hell Through a Windshield'' is not quite a memoir. "The Fat Man and the Elephant" (the other original, and perhaps my favorite in the collection) most resembles a mainstream story of character, but unlike any you will ever see in
The New Yorker.
Joe's life would have been easier if he'd been willing to blunt these stories in order to fit them into the conventional categories. Publishers would be able to slap a label on him that would stick; his audience would already be defined; people writing introductions to his short story collections could say, "If you like [fill in the blank] you'll love Joe Lansdale."
But Joe doesn't walk that line, and he's not the first. For example there's Don DeLillo and William Goldman and Graham Greene, writers who have become categories unto themselves. It takes longer for these writers to build an audience, longer to find a publisher who'll put up with
their
departures. They demand readers who think for themselves, who want more than just one more fix of the same old thing.
There's not a lot of incentive for these writers. The pressure to go rogue this way, to jump off the interstate and cut your own roads, has to come from inside. It takes ambition and determination, patience and courage. Much the same qualities it took for Joe to drag himself, by his bootstraps, out of the East Texas swamps of Gladewater, Texas (immortalized as "Mud Creek" in many of his stories) and off to the relative metropolis of Nacogdoches.
Once those new roads are cut, however, everybody else is rushing to get on them.
Joe has as much drive to write as anybody I've ever seen. He's never met a writing challenge he couldn't solve with his one-size-fits-all advice, "Put ass to chair in front of typewriter.'' He spends every available minute working. There was a stretch after his son Keith was born when that meant typing with an infant on his lap. (Which made, by the way, for some weird intrusions in his letters.)
Joe writes from his heart, and he lives the same way. I've gotten letters from him that tore my work to shreds, and then awkwardly apologized for his honesty. The thing is, I don't believe there was a choice involved. If Joe couldn't tell me what he really thought, I don't think he would have been able to write at all.
Which brings us back to the stories in this collection. Every one of them is the truth the way Joe saw it at the time. Joe doesn't especially enjoy frightening or disturbing or embarrassing his readers. But if that's the price of honesty, it's a price he's willing to pay.
This is Joe's first short story collection. I think it's a triumph in its own small way. Here is an individual whose vision was strong enough to overpower the faint-hearted, to confound the restrictions of genres, to outlast poverty, tragedy, and obscurity. Here is a vision that is finally coming into its own.
This book documents Joe's vision in technicolor and 3-D. It's an express mail package from hell, full of black humor, crawling horror, outrageous and telling satire,
memorable
characters, and above all a sense of personal integrity. And if the truth makes you a little uncomfortable, or maybe just flat scares the shit out of you, then you'd better leave the lights on while you read it.
F
ISH
N
IGHT
For Bill Pronzini
It was a bleached-bone afternoon with a cloudless sky and a monstrous sun. The air trembled like a mass of gelatinous ectoplasm. No wind blew.
Through the swelter came a worn, black Plymouth, coughing and belching white smoke from beneath its hood. It wheezed twice, backfired loudly, died by the side of the road.
The driver got out and went around to the hood. He was a man in the hard winter years of life, with dead brown hair and a heavy belly riding his hips. His shirt was open to the navel, the sleeves rolled up past his elbows. The hair on his chest and arms was gray.
A younger man climbed out on the passenger side, went around front too. Yellow sweat-explosions stained the pits of his white shirt. An unfastened, striped tie was draped over his neck like a pet snake that had died in its sleep.
"Well?" the younger man said.
The old man said nothing. He opened the hood. A calliope note of steam blew out from the radiator in a white puff, rose to the sky, turned clear.
"Damn," the old man said, and he kicked the bumper of the Plymouth as if he were kicking a foe in the teeth. He got little satisfaction out of the action, just a nasty scuff on his brown wingtip and a jar to his ankle that hurt like hell.
"Well?" the young man repeated.
"Well what? What do you think? Dead as the can opener
trade
this week. Deader. The radiator's chickenpocked with holes."
"Maybe someone will come by and give us a hand."
"Sure."
"A ride anyway."
"Keep thinking that, college boy."
"Someone is bound to come along," the young man said.
"Maybe. Maybe not. Who else takes these cutoffs? The main highway, that's where everyone is. Not this little no account shortcut." He finished by glaring at the young man.
"I didn't make you take it," the young man snapped. "It was on the map. I told you about it, that's all. You chose it. You're the one that decided to take it. It's not my fault. Besides, who'd have expected the car to die?"
"I did tell you to check the water in the radiator, didn't I? Wasn't that back as far as El Paso?"
"I checked. It had water then. I tell you, it's not my fault. You're the one that's done all the Arizona driving."
"Yeah, yeah," the old man said, as if this were something he didn't want to hear. He turned to look up the highway.
No cars. No trucks. Just heat waves and miles of empty concrete in sight.
They seated themselves on the hot ground with their backs to the car. That way it provided some shadeâbut not much. They sipped on a jug of lukewarm water from the Plymouth and spoke little until the sun fell down. By then they had both mellowed a bit. The heat had vacated the sands and the desert chill had settled in. Where the warmth had made the pair snappy, the cold drew them together.
The old man buttoned his shirt and rolled down his sleeves while the young man rummaged a sweater out of the backseat. He put the sweater on, sat back down. "I'm sorry about this," he said suddenly.
"Wasn't your fault. Wasn't anyone's fault. I just get to yelling sometime, taking out the can-opener trade on ev
erything
but the can-openers and myself. The days of the door-to-door salesman are gone, son."
"And I thought I was going to have an easy summer job," the young man said.
The old man laughed. "Bet you did. They talk a good line, don't they?"
"I'll say!"
"Make it sound like found money, but there ain't no found money, boy. Ain't nothing simple in this world. The company is the only one ever makes any money. We just get tireder and older with more holes in our shoes. If I had any sense I'd have quit years ago. All you got to make is this summerâ"
"Maybe not that long."
"Well, this is all I know. Just town after town, motel after motel, house after house, looking at people through screen wire while they shake their heads No. Even the cockroaches at the sleazy motels begin to look like little fellows you've seen before, like maybe they're door-to-door peddlers that have to rent rooms too."
The young man chuckled. "You might have something there."