The Best of Joe R. Lansdale

heard of.

Classics Illustrated led me to read the books from which they were adapted, when I could get my hands on books. They weren’t readily available in small town East Texas. In fact, though I was born in Gladewater, my early years were spent in a town of 150 or so, called Mt. Enterprise. There was little enterprise to be found there, but I remember the place fondly, and it was a wonderful place for a kid to grow up. I felt like Huckleberry Finn, who didn’t mind going home. And, in fact, I preferred to wind up in my room in my bed at night, perhaps to slip secretly into the living room to watch a late night movie, preferably science fiction, and all the better yet if space aliens were involved. Even better if they were the sort that were frightening and pissed off, and no friend of Earth. It made for a better story, and I was always drawn to that more than the “they don’t really mean me any harm” aliens, though, on some level I liked it all.

Forbidden Planet, It Came from Outer Space, This Island Earth, The Day the Earth Stood Still, so many others, including one special bit of creepy nastiness, the original Invaders from Mars.

I had a bedroom that reminded me of Invaders. It had a back window that looked out on a back yard that also reminded me of the story, and not far away a stretch of woods. The movie came on late one night, on one of the three television stations available back then, one only available when the weather was

a certain way and you held your mouth right and shifted your nuts to one side while you turned the antennae by hand.

I snuck into the living room to watch it, and it scared the bejesus out of me, didn’t scar me, but tattooed me with deep, bright imagination ink leaking all the colors of the rainbow, and within the colors were dollops of delightful fear, sort you can get away from with the coming of sunlight, the passing of day, the immersion into something else. I liked this sensation.

I’ve seen the movie since, and it’s still cool, but what’s really good is the first twenty minutes or so, and the last few minutes. The middle minutes, with the aliens is a little less terrifying than I remember. Now I see the zippers and the men from Mars look a lot like guys in suits, and the master mind, a telepathic, tentacle-sprouting head in a jar, is like a sad octopus battling depression. And, of course, there’s a portion lifted from what looks like an ad for the National Guard. Back then we believed the U.S. military could whip anybody and anything, including a bunch of zipper-suited Martians and their tentacle-headed leader.

Still, I love that movie. The power of the mind is great, and there was less to compare it to. No fantastic Star Wars effects and beyond, just simple suggestion and shadow. And now that I think about it, the film was in color, and yet it had a magnificent hint of noir about it, a surrealistic edge that seeps into my work a lot of the time.

Later on, a little older, I was hit the same way by the original black and white Invasion of the Body Snatchers, one that time doesn’t damage, but in fact, makes creepier.

Wow! Got to get my breath. The memories are like arrows tipped with nostalgia, shooting straight through the heart.

Mt. Enterprise didn’t have a library, though one was founded shortly before we moved, partly due to the interest of local women, like my mother, and the kind donation of someone with actual money. But before the library, there were only the occasional books given to me, or loaned to me, or on rare occasions, bought for me, due to their lack of availability in a town so small. There was the Bible, and I read it from cover to cover, and loved it, but realized rather quickly, like the Greek mythology I loved even more, it was nothing more than fantastic stories. Wonderful in their own way, but religion… I was suspicious, and by the time I was seventeen, having read the Bible from cover to cover numerous times, loving the lilt of the language in the same way I love Shakespeare, it was pretty clear to me that there wasn’t much reality in those pages. I liked the use of violence and horror and morality play, but for me it was a lot less fascinating and satisfying than the works of Homer. The old blind guy could tell a tale of foul and wounded and imperfect people and gods with the best of them. Better than the Bible. Better than Shakespeare. Homer, he was the bomb.

I lived inside of books — Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, loaned me by a lady across the street — and moved about in them, as if they were living tissue and I was their aching guts. I was especially fond of Saturday mornings, which for a kid is the magic day. I would get up early on Saturdays, and nothing was more disappointing than sleeping late, losing that wonderful day of the week. I’d jump up and my mother would fix me eggs and toast, and sometimes bacon, and I’d watch things like Fury, a story about a horse and the boy who loved him, or better yet, serials like Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers, both starring Buster Crabbe, with different hair shades. And best of all, Tarzan. I came to love Tarzan as much as Batman.

There were many Tarzans, but Johnny Weissmuller was my favorite, hands down. But I’d take any Tarzan I could get. Gordon Scott, Buster Crabbe (yep, same guy who played Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, and many other heroes), whichever Tarzan movie and actor that was on Saturday morning TV. It’s hard to see those movies now and think they were the same ones I saw. Because in my head, those black and white films, seen then, were in bright color and the jungles were rich and real and full of savagery. Tarzan, for me, was real. Lived in a cool tree house, had a funny chimpanzee for a pet named Cheeta, and a hot wife named Jane. I had some interesting dreams about that tree house and Jane. The chimp, Cheeta, I hasten to add, was not in those dreams.

And then there was the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Loved those guys. I always wanted to be Tonto. Maybe because I had heard we had Indian blood in the family. To this day, I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s always been part of the family story, so perhaps it is; perhaps I am in fact Cherokee and Chickasaw, and perhaps Quanah Parker, the great Comanche War Chief, is kin to me by marriage.

Perhaps not, but these were part of the family stories, along with frontier tales of my kin traveling in covered wagons, going by horse, being pursued by panthers, bitten by snakes, fighting the elements and belligerent people; some of my people perhaps being the most belligerent of all.

Then came the building of that local library, and I read dog stories that told me dogs were noble and true and loyal and fine, and I believed it. I read adventure stories, and mystery stories, and horror stories, and finally, Edgar Rice Burroughs. The world really cracked open then, showed me dimensions that were sideways, threw me on a tilt-a-whirl full of magic that made all the magic before as small and dim as a birthday cake candle. It’s hard to beat a world where all the women are beautiful and go naked, and men carry swords, monsters are slain, and it’s all a simple morality tale. For boys, swords, naked women, and simple views are way cool. And did I mention naked women?

So you get the idea. I was dipped and battered and buttered and way deep fried in the idea of the hero; the idea that what was noble could stand against anything what was not; that a good man need do no more than put his chest out, keep his eyes lifted, and plod forward; bullies were cowards and dogs were your friends. Right against wrong. Good against evil. America against them.

And then, the sixties rose up over the horizon, head first, long-haired and skeptical, and things went topsy. I learned a valuable lesson. A lot of what I had been taught about right and wrong, the simplicity of it, the American view, was not exactly on the money. Certain dreams and illusions were crucified on the crosses of reality, and though some of those dreams climbed down from the cross, alive and breathing, if a little wounded, the dead ones remained dead, not risen, not reborn, just dead. Same as Jesus, I might add.

So, like the Lone Ranger, I rode on into the shadow of change, the nineteen-sixties, and when I rode out, I was a different person, still masked, still riding, but my clothes were ripped and dirty and the hat was gone, the long-haired head I now possessed was bowed, and the horse, man, he was tired. My view on dogs, though, even tired and barely mounted, has never changed. They’re still way cool. And I suppose I have to mention cats in passing. I wish them the best, including my two, but I was never crazy about them.

Backtrack.

The wind of the sixties started to build after the death of John F. Kennedy, who gave our country a big dose of hope and respect for intelligence, education, and longer hairdos. When he was gone something ripped in the fabric of space and time, and from those dimensions something crawled free that could only be seen out of the corner of the eye during a certain moment in the day when the light was right (or wrong), and that something was a reality check.

Even the good can die.

Even the young can die.