East Texas gem
Novelist Lansdale conjures rich, dark stories from place he loves
NACOGDOCHES — A 50-year-old baby-blue Volkswagen Beetle stops in the middle of Fredonia
Street. Its white-haired occupant steps from the car and says to a man on the sidewalk, “Are you Joe Lansdale?”
The author smiles and nods. “I like your writing,” the driver says, and then he gets back into the car and disappears, just like that.
“It’s always nice when somebody takes the time to say something like that,” Lansdale says. “The only thing that could ruin a moment like that is if a car went around and ran him over.”
Lansdale pauses a moment. “Well, it would’ve ruined the moment, but it might’ve made for a more interesting story.”
For all but a few of his nearly 70 years, Lansdale has considered, studied, practiced, refined and mastered the architecture of storytelling. His body of work testifies to that: He’s written and published nearly 50 novels, dozens of novellas, short stories, chapbooks, several screenplays for film and TV, anthologies, comic books. His work spans crime and suspense, fantasy and horror, science fiction and Westerns.
“He’s really somebody that you might call a cult writer, but he’s a cult writer with 10 different cults,” says Steve Davis, curator of the Southwestern Writers Collection at Texas State University’s Wittliff Collections. “I don’t think people in Texas quite understand what we have with Joe Lansdale. He’s an amazing precious natural resource. I think he’ll go down in history as one of the great writers. People will look back and think, ‘Wow, we had this guy here in Texas.’ ”
The Sundance TV series “Hap and Leonard” recently drew greater attention to a crime series Lansdale has written across 30 years. His latest work, though, is not part of a series. “Moon Lake” — out late last month — is a standalone novel set in East Texas, naturally. Where many writers find the open expanse of West Texas tantalizing, Lansdale instead pitched his tent in the dense Big Thicket. “Moon Lake” incorporates so much of what makes Lansdale’s far-flung work so good: He touches on old social issues with contemporary resonance; he gets into family and corruption with characters presented so richly that they almost walk off the pages; and once again he finds himself writing with an unflinching elegance about the things that lurk beneath the surface of a body of water.
“It’s never only about the water with me,” Lansdale says. “It’s that idea of mystery underneath. Something representational. I like that a whole lot.”
‘Dark water’
On a day with oppressive heat and no cloud cover, Lansdale moves around the historical center of Nacogdoches in little bursts like a lizard. He points out historical sites and buildings before leading the way to the Boss Light, a space owned by fellow novelist Tim Bryant that sells books, art and music. Lansdale’s titles command an entire shelf.
Lansdale has been in Nacogdoches for decades. If Stephen King has Maine, Lansdale has East Texas. He’s spent years considering and conjuring stories that might lurk in its dark nooks.
The action in “Moon Lake” starts in 1968, when Daniel Russell’s dad deliberately drives his car off a bridge in the town of Long Lincoln. Russell is rescued by a Black man and his daughter and briefly lives with them until he can be placed with an aunt. The story picks up a decade later in New Long Lincoln when Russell’s father’s car is finally found with an additional set of bones in the trunk. Moon Lake, it turns out, holds a lot of secrets, including the history of a part of town that had been occupied by Black residents until a dam was built and the neighborhood was left underwater.
Lansdale spent much of 2020 writing the book, drawing from all manner of sources — some more obvious than others. He remembered Harper Lee once described a murderous grift near her hometown that he stored in the back of his mind. He recalled a news story about a person driving off a bridge. Places like Old Bluffton — an underwater Texas ghost town — were also on his mind, as was his hometown of Gladewater.
A theme regarding home emerges from an evocative first sentence: “My name is Daniel Russell. I dream of dark water.”
What lurks beneath
“My mother was always telling me if I didn’t get an education,
I’d end up digging ditches,” Lansdale says.
He pauses.
“My first job was digging ditches.”
Lansdale was born and spent most of his childhood in Gladewater. His father, Bud, was a mechanic who couldn’t read or write. His mother, O’Reta, filled the house with books and magazines. He was drawn to comic books first, then Classics Illustrated, which took books by Dickens and Dostoevsky and turned them into graphic novels long before that phrase had cultural currency. He found Edgar Rice Burroughs’ speculative fiction around age 10.
“I wanted to be a writer before that, but after reading Burroughs, I knew I had to be,” he says. “Of course, I had no idea there was a career in it or anything.”
Lansdale got a few stories published in the 1970s. But he’d never met another writer until he came across Ardath Mayhar, a Timpson native who settled in Nacogdoches, where she ran a bookstore. Lansdale had read her story “Crawfish” in an Alfred Hitchcock anthology.
“It was set in East Texas, and it had the East Texas vernacular,” he says. “The background. That changed my life right there.”
Lansdale leaned into what he knew: the people, the places. There’s a passage in “Moon
Lake” in which he describes the sound of a cockroach moving beneath wallpaper. It’s as fleeting a moment as can be: a single sentence in a novel that has no bearing on the plot. But his use of “crackle” to describe the sound is instantly unnerving.
“It’s pretty terrible,” Lansdale says with a crooked smile, “when you see the wallpaper move.”
Chaos and order
Lansdale’s biography reads like a movie. Before his books began to sell, he worked as a janitor at Stephen F. Austin University. He never got a degree but would later go on to serve as writer-in-residence there. Bryant is among his former students.
“He taught me everything I know,” Bryant says.
Lansdale offers an alternative to the quintessential reclusive novelist. He radiates with energy and presents the persona of an enthusiast, whether he’s talking about books by his friends, his affinity for ZZ Top or the history of his adopted town. He’s quick with a joke, self-deprecating — he’d be the sort of history professor students favored. He’s also an inductee in two martial arts halls of fame, the result of 60 years work to attain a 10th-degree black belt in Shen Chuan Martial Science.
Here his seemingly permanent smile flattens almost imperceptibly. He points out he’ll be 70 this October.
“But I can still put you in the home … ”
Lansdale says these two pursuits — writing and self-defense — don’t serve as counterweights to one another.
“I think writing and martial arts require a lot of the same thinking,” he says. “When martial arts is done right, it’s creative and spontaneous. It’s dealing with chaos. So they’re very similar.”
Chaos is the coal that burns in Lansdale’s fiction. He imagines it, sets it loose and tries to find ways to contain it with words. For all his cheeriness, Lansdale has hatched some vivid descriptions of despicable acts, often — but not always — committed by despicable people. He also is unafraid to tread on any terrain. He operates as though hot buttons are to be pushed rather than avoided.
“You have to admire Joe because he has that independent Texas spirit,” Davis says. “He writes unabashedly about this particular area in Texas with great affection and insight. And no fear either. He’s not afraid to offend anybody.”
Lansdale once wrote a list of his thoughts on writing. “Frankly,” he wrote, “when I write, I try to write like everyone I know is dead. This way I’m not worried about what anyone thinks.”
“Moon Lake” finds the author writing again about race and class in East Texas. He returns to the subject frequently in some of his best work, including “The Bottoms” and “A Fine Dark
“I try to write like everyone I know is dead. This way I’m not worried about what anyone thinks.”
Joe R. Lansdale
Line.” Even Hap and Leonard, his amateur investigator odd couple, allow him to work heavy themes into briskly paced crime novels. Hap is white, a guy who went to prison for refusing to serve in the Vietnam War, and somebody who’s list of jobs mirrors Lansdale’s. Leonard is a gay, Black veteran with no tolerance for homophobia and racism but a fairly rigid conservative sense of justice and decorum otherwise.
“You have to be impacted by these things if you grow up around them,” Lansdale says. “That’s why I feel like John Lewis was right: Things are better than they were. To say they aren’t sounds hopeless. There was a time a Black person couldn’t walk into this bookstore. There have been steps forward, but clearly we need more.”
Lansdale finds fiction the best vessel to comment on such issues. “I get to make a living being a liar,” he says. “But there’s a sort of thing, telling the truth is easer to do in fiction, and I think it has greater validity. I feel like you can touch the heart of a matter of something faster with fiction than nonfiction.”
Ditches, ruts and retirement
Lansdale’s description of his workday sounds like the way he moves around town, just with his fingers doing all the work.
“I’m not one of those people who enjoys having written,” he says. “I enjoy writing and having written. Sometimes I have a bad day, but there’s been no writer’s block in my life. I don’t believe in it.”
He quotes his friend, writer Stephen Graham Jones, who Lansdale says once asked, “Do ditch diggers get ditchdigger block?”
“Maybe they do,” he says. “But I used to dig ditches. I worked in the aluminum-chair plant, Imperial American it was called. I worked as a farmer. I worked for Goodwill Industries. I was a janitor at the university.
“All that stuff about writing where you crawl up on the cross every day, to hell with you. Go dig a ditch.”
Shortly before he left his house to offer a short tour of Nacogdoches, Lansdale finished an introduction to a collection of Hap and Leonard short stories and a short story unrelated to that book. He’s two-thirds of the way through a new novel. What follows? He has a screenplay he may return to. He may start pushing on a new Hap and Leonard novel.
“As usual, I’ve got more things than I can get done,” he says. “But that’s fine because I can’t imagine retiring. I don’t want to retire ever. That’s the scariest thing I’ve ever heard of.”