Wed 8 Apr 2015
JOE R. LANSDALE – Sunset and Sawdust. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 2004. Vintage, trade paperback, 2005.
It begins as a tornado hits the home of Sunset Jones and her husband Pete, and it ends soon after a gigantic swarm of ground-clearing locusts hits the small East Texas sawmill town of Camp Rapture. The country is in the midst of the Depression, and Pete, the town’s constable, does not survive the house-leveling storm. While he is raping Sunset, she pulls his gun from his holster and shoots him clean through the head.
There are quite a few places in this book where I simply had to stop and say to myself “Wow!†or “Oh, my!†and this is only the first of them. The second is a little more subtle – Sunset’s mother-in-law, having gone through the same wife-beating routine with Pete’s daddy, sticks up for her, even so far as convincing the locals that Sunset would make a fine replacement for Pete as the town’s law enforcement officer. (She is the co-owner of the sawmill, after all.)
What does Sunset know about police work? Very little, but with the of two deputies, both of whom are either in love or unrequited lust with her, she starts right in – and makes enemies right and left. Uppity is hardly the word for Sunset. As far as Camp Rapture is concerned, she has three strikes against her. She shot her husband. She’s a woman doing a man’s job. She sided with a black man who killed the sheriff the next town over, not that that worked out very well.
This is not your ordinary detective puzzle mystery, although there is one to be solved. There are times when Lansdale verges into Stephen King territory, or perhaps this is the result that would occur if Mr. King were to verge into Mr. Lansdale’s East Texas venue, with some of the scariest villains you will never read about in your everyday straight-laced Perry Mason courtroom drama.
What you will discover, were you to decide to read this book, is that once started, you will never know which direction it will go next. Staid and sedate is not Joe R. Lansdale’s forte, and you will never find a better example than this.
April 8th, 2015 at 10:24 pm
This is a sub genre of East Texas Gothic that Joe Lansdale probably does better than anyone now putting pen to paper (Bill Crider and Edward Mathis both worked different sides of East Texas mystery) that can veer into near Stevie B, but has its roots in Two Gun Bob Howard, camp fire tales, and the Cohen Brothers BLOOD SIMPLE.
I’m not sure anyone does it quite as well as Lansdale though, and like the East Texas Gothic film PLACES IN THE HEART it can even have a touch of South American Magic Realism at times.
Rural, piney woods, lakes filled with near swamps, the Big Thicket, some of the oldest towns in the nation, stills, farmers, ranchers, French, Spanish, Texican, and Confederate history, Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, bootleggers, Dallas gamblers, Dixie Mafia, ticks, mosquitos the size of horses, cottonmouths, copperheads, rattlers, and gators it is an uncomfortable mix of wild west and Mayberry.
Lansdale captures it as well as anyone popular of literary.
One of my grandmother’s lived there, I can tell you Sunset would not be that eccentric a name. Her’s was Addie Love.
Until about 1962 juries in Texas could still be instructed to consider the unwritten “he needed killing” law designed to allow abused wives who could not divorce or get away to blow hubby away and walk.
April 9th, 2015 at 9:29 pm
I generally give Lansdale’s zombie and werewolf stories a pass, but when he writes about “normal” human characters, I’m right there with him.