About the only thing more eagerly awaited by a jaded suspense and dark fantasy buff than a new Joe Lansdale novel is a new Joe Lansdale collection. It's here, and it's descriptively titled A Fist Full of Stories (And Articles). Naturally the first controversy has been a teapot tempest swirling about the title. Should the word "fistful" have been used in lieu of the more evocative phrase actually employed? Well...no. Forget Strunk and White. The present lingiustic structure simply works. That's the point.
There are a dozen actual stories here, along with a novel excerpt, five essays, and a play. The potpourri doesn't carry the two-by-four whack in the head of earlier Lansdale collections as By Bizarre Hands, but it functions just fine by its own terms. The author himself lines out those terms in a short introduction: "...here is my garage sale, a few dusty, out of fashion, but still interesting items, as well as some real up-to-date business that has been neglected by readers or appeared in lesser known magazines..." Curiosity pieces, says the author. Things you really need. Things you don't need, but want. Habitual browsers in curio shops will grasp the concept instantly. Others will catch on quickly.
If something in the contents doesn't delight you , hey, skip on to the next entry. There's something here for virtually everyone. The book leads with a novelette that first saw print in Roger Zelazny's martial arts anthology, Warriors fo blood and Dream. A bit derivitive of Lansdale's own "Steel Valentine", "Master of Misery" is a spare tale of an American expatriate in the Caribbean who gets sucked into a deadly triangle involving a beautiful woman and psychotic husband who is angling to set up a martial arts duel to the death. It's a tough story in the Jim Harrisan tradition.
Other stories here are shorter and often less substantial. "Bar Talk" is a first-person narrative about Martian feeding habits in Earthly bars. Its evokes the shade of Fredric Brown. "The Mummy Buyer" first appeared in a mystery magazine. It gives the business of forging valuable artifacts a whole new angle. "Beyond the Light", also from the mystery arena, allows the psychological basis for crazed killers to shuttle between the rational and th supernatural. In "Personality Problem", a vignette Lansdale sold to Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, Frankenstein's monster adopts a down-home personality but, troubled by his public reception, consults a therepist.
Lansdale wrote "A Change of Lifestyle" with his wife, Karen. It's an ingenuous change rung on Kafka, with a Siberian husky gradually metamorphosing into your basic local guy. To complete the processof family collaboration, Lansdale wrote "The Companion" with his kids, Keith and Kasey Jo, for Great Writers and Their Kids Write Spooky Stories, a sadly overlooked origianl anthology. This one's a highly energetic tale about a guy fishing out in the countryside, who finds himself in a life-or-death duel with a malevolently animated scarecrow. It'd make a good bedtime story....
"Chapter Six" from the suspense novel, Two-Bear Mambo, brings to life a beautifully atmospheric anecdotal narrative about East Texas's Big Thicket, the kind of swampy wilderness you really wouldn't want to get lost in. The dramatic script for Lansdale's previously published short story, "Drive-In Date", is just as nasty as the prose version. It's a pointed little cameo of genuinely disturbed male bonding. The script was turned into a commercially available direct-to-video short feature.
"Billie Sure" appears here for the first time. It manages the paradoxical achievement of being both crazed and ultimately slight. "The Pasture" takes us into a bizarre rural world that could have been one of Gary Larson's grimmer Far Side cartoons. "Old Charlie" is another fishing story with a grim twist.
Just about all the fiction here holds it own; but most doesn't represent Lansdale at his vintage best. At its best it entertains just fine; at is worst it still tickles. Garage sale stories - you take your chances.
Most of the real prizes in the volume are the nonfiction pieces. There are two installments of Lansdale's Iniquities Magazine column, "Lansdale Raves". This is great work about the genesis and process of written word storytelling. The three episodes of "Trash Theater," written with Lansdale's companion-in-crime, David E. Webb, are a joy and inspiration to couch potatoes everywhere. Viva Las Vegas and The Bible, the blaxpolitation thriller Dolomite and Clam Bake, two more, all get the Joe bob Briggs treatment. Actually Lansdlae and Webb have created their own idiosyncratic composite voice that varies from Briggs. It's maybe a little more carefullyconsidered... At any rate, it's a very good thing that the fist is full of articles too.
Lansdlae closes the volume out with brief but complete story notes. That's the trade edition; quite a mixture. The somewhat more expensive limited edition adds something interesting on beyond the signature page and slipcase. There's nearly another 80 pages, a neatly incorporated insert containing Lansdale's two Batman novelettes. I'm sure Ted Naifeh's stark jacket illustration will not be to everyone's taste. It incorporates Lansdale's image, but presenst him less as the East Texas good guy, and more as many reader's image of Captain Wolf Larson in The Sea Wolf.
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