by Joe R. Lansdale
Mulholland Books (Little Brown & Co) 2016
Method of selection: Required textbook at my local honky-tonk samurai class. I’m trying to earn my Shitty Belt
First sentence: I don’t think we ask for trouble, me and Leonard.
Worst sentence: In less than a half an hour, about noon, my butt crack would be completely filled with sweat and breathing air would be like swallowing fishhooks.
Awards Joe R. Lansdale has won for his writing: Edgar Award, eleven Bram Stoker Awards, American Mystery Award, British Fantasy Award, Grinzane Cavour Prize for Literature, World Horror Convention Grand Master Award, the Sugarprize, Raymond Chandler Lifetime Achievement Award, Spur Award.
Martial Arts Halls of Fame he is a member of: United States, International
Before I start my review, watch this:
That’s the author, Joe R. Lansdale, teaching a martial art he made up called Shen Chuan, which is Chinese for “Shitty Book”. I’m not saying he couldn’t kick my ass, all I’m saying is that Joe R. Lansdale invented a martial art to beat up anyone who calls him out for writing shitty books. The student he’s abusing here gave him two stars on Amazon.
Honky Tonk Samurai is crap. Like, it’s not just shitty. It’s also just lousy. It’s a barnstorm of lousiness. And I don’t feel bad saying that because Joe R. Lansdale has written something like 40 novels, some of which have won prestigious awards, such as the Grinzane Cavour Prize, which no longer exists but when it did, the award was handed out in an Italian Castle, possibly haunted by shitty ghosts. And you don’t get bigger than that unless it’s an award handed out in a bigger castle.
This book doesn’t start with a car ride or an upcoming wedding or a murder like most shitty books but it does start with two guys in a truck and an unhappy marriage. Lansdale tries to make his writing funny
holding a whitebread fart out of courtesy
and he tries to make it edgy
a messy mass of jagged parts and twisted metal and wads of bleeding human flesh
and he tries to make it meaningful
By the time you’re fifty you start to realize just how much of your time on earth you’ve wasted.
He tries to make it quaint and lowbrow, in a shit-kicking southwestern kind of way, but he doesn’t manage to kick the shittiness out of his own writing. Yet, it must have impressed somebody somewhere, perhaps an Italian ghost with a lot of that Old Ghost Money to burn because Sundance has been making a show out of it. The acting has been described as “shit-kicking” and overall the show has been reviewed as “Wednesdays on Sundance.”
You can usually tell how shitty a book is by how overblown and impossible the puff quotes are. Like the Austin Chronicle, which calls Joe R. Lansdale
…the new Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner gone madder, and the last surviving splatterpunk…
The New York Times Book Review says Joe R. Lansdale has
…a folklorist’s eye for telling detail and a front-porch raconteur’s sense of pace.
What the fuck is a front-porch raconteur? Have you even met one? Does he work in the New York Times Book Review office? weaving tales of bygone shitty books through his missing front teeth and corncob pipe while eating pone and tack whatever pone and tack are?
I wonder if all those awards Joe R. Lansdale has received were really for the books he DIDN’T write. Like, “thanks for not shitting in our pool this year, Joe. The world of novels is better off. Here’s your trophy, sir. Please don’t Shen Chuan my puppy.”
Other reviews: Battered, Tattered, Yellowed, and Creased, Milo’s Rambles, Written By Sime
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