Joe R. Lansdale - Savage Season

[andydecker]

Joe R. Lansdale - Savage Season (Bantam Books, 1990, 210 pages)

Cover by Alan Ayers

Not exactly a horror novel, it still became a Bram Stoker Award nominee. This is the first tale of Hap and Leonard, a kind of … it is a bit hard to describe. Private detectives, fixers, hired muscle, middle men – all of those and more. Hap is a "white working class laborer who spent time in federal prison as a young man for refusing to be drafted into the military and serve in the Vietnam War", Leonard is a "a gay, black Vietnam vet with serious anger issues". Both live and work in East Texas, and there is a "great deal of violence, profanity, and sex" in the books.

While the buddy P.I. novel was a well established and successful concept at the time – see Robert B. Parker or Robert Crais – this particular concept was ahead of its time which maybe explains why it became not a bigger seller. Published by a lot of different small publishers from Mark Ziesing Books to Mysterious Press and later Subterranean Press, the series became a slow success in the course of 30 years.

Still "Hap and Leonard" managed to reach ten novels, four novellas, and three short-story collections, not to mentions a TV series which ran from 2016 to 2018.

This first novel started like most of the early Lansdale books as a mass market paperback. (A field he later was much divorced from in the new millennium.) But it had arguably the best cover of all its later incarnations.

[pbsplatter]

Are they any good?

[helrunar]

If you're gay and black living in East Texas, you're going to be angry, or even more likely enraged, 99.99 percent of the time.

Intriguing concept. I wonder what the television version looked like.

Thanks Andreas!

Hel.

[andydecker]

Jan 16, 2023 16:29:59 GMT pbsplatter said:

Are they any good?

I guess in this case it is more a matter of taste than usual. Nasty hoods, rednecks, sleazy common crimes, lots and lots of snappy dialogue, a bit of Southern Gothic without the supernatural. Unglamorous mystery. I am not a big fan of Lansdale, even if I often think I should, but what he does he does incredibly well in a few sentences and more shocking than a brigade of splatter punks.