Things Get Ugly: The Best Crime Fiction of Joe R. Lansdale

The 19 stories in this collection are not crime stories as we generally think of them. Someone commits a crime, usually a murder, and then there is an investigation by a private investigator or the police who uncover, or don’t, the culprit.

In Lansdale’s collection people do commit crimes, but the focus is not on the investigation of the wrongdoing. The focus is on how many body parts can be strewn over the countryside, how many gallons of bodily fluids can be dumped into different containers, and how slowly the person whose parts and fluids are the subject of the strewing and dumping suffers in the process. It is a genre called “splatterpunk.” According to Wikipedia, “Splatterpunk is a movement within horror fiction originating in the 1980s, distinguished by its graphic, often gory, depiction of violence, countercultural alignment and ‘hyperintensive horror with no limits.’” 

A couple of examples of the graphic gory depiction of violence found in Lansdale’s collection will give the reader an idea. In “Six-Finger Jack” the bounty hunter is told to come back with Jack’s hand to prove Jack is dead. “I hit him so hard (with the hatchet) his knees bent and hot blood jumped out of his head and hit my face. The hatchet came loose of my hands, stayed in his skull . . . The rain was washing the blood on his head down his face in murky rivers. He stunk like roadkill. . . . He went down on one knee, and I hauled back and hit him with the firewood, hitting the top of the hatchet. He vibrated, and his neck twisted to one side . . . stretched his arm out until I had the hand with the six fingers positioned. I got down on my knees and lifted the hatchet, hit as hard as I could. It took me three whacks, but I cut his hand loose. I put the bloody hand in my coat pocket.”

Not only is there blood and gore, but the pleasure of creating it is palpable. From “I Tell You It’s Love.”

“What did you do?”

“I kicked him,” I said, and Gloria’s smile was a beauty to behold.

. . .

“God how I kicked him. Kicked him in the face until there was no nose, no lips, not eyes, Only red mush . . .  I touched his face and tasted it with my tongue and my lips.

“Ohh,” she sighed, her eyes half closed.

The voice in most of the stories sounds the same, as if it is the same character narrating each story, a middle-aged dude with a grudge who hasn’t quite made it in the world. There are two exceptions, and they make for two of the better stories in the collection. The first is the voice of a teenage Oklahoma girl in “Driving to Geronimo’s Grave.” It is about a trip she and her sister take to pick up the body of their dead uncle. He needed burying. The two girls manage to outwit their uncle’s sidekick, find their buried money, get rid of the sidekick when he chases their car, grabs the door handle, and when the car swerves to the right and the handle comes loose the sidekick is whipped out across the road and into some trees. And this being splatterpunk, “He done bent up in a way you don’t bend.” So the girls end up with the money.

The second story of note is “The Shadows, Kith and Kin.” It tries, with some success, to get into the head of Charles Whitman, who climbed the University of Texas tower in Austin and killed 15 people and wounded 31 in 1966. There is the feel of poetry to it. The first lines: “There are no leaves left on the trees, and the limbs are weighted with ice and bending low./ Many of them have broken and fallen across the drive. Beyond the drive, down where it and the road meet, where the bar ditch is, there is a brown savage run of water.”

And it is not entirely true that there are no real crime stories in this collection. “Dead Sister” is a crime story in almost the traditional sense. A blonde knocks on a detective’s door and tells him that someone is disturbing his sister’s grave. And we get the appropriate dialogue, “Can you start right away?” “Soon as the money hits my palm.” Spoiler alert: turns out the culprit is a ghoul who the detective ends up chopping up and setting on fire.

The title of this story collection would more appropriately be People do Ugly Things. Many readers will find out about them in greater detail than they may wish to. This reader did.