Mucho Mojo is being heralded as Joe R. Lansdale's long awaited breakout book, and I think it very well could be exactly that. Lansdale's published a dozen and a half novels and short story collections, edited several anthologies, written for such comics as Jonah Hex, and still isn't quite a household word. I hope this one'll do it for the guy. Much like S.K. Epperson and a number of other nifty writers, Lansdale tends to mix genres to good effect but to the distraction of marketing departments. He writes mystery, dark suspense, horror, western, other sorts of fiction-and often lets all these strains hybridize one another. He knows, too, the value of leavening the darkest material with humor, grim realism with moral passion. Lansdale possesses a strong sense of location, as well as a wonderful gift for regional voice. There's a touch of Harry Crews in him, a streak of Cormac McCarthy.
You get the whole Lansdale package in Mucho Mojo. Though little notice is taken of it, this novel is the second volume in a seris that started with Savage Season, a paperback original from Bantam a few years back. Once again we meet Hap Collins, the anti-war ex-con, still slaving in the stifling summer rose fields of East Texas. One day he's rescued by his gay black friend, Leonard Pine. Leonard's Uncle Chester has died in his house in the black slums of LaBorde, Texas, and Leonard wants his friend's support to get through the funeral.
Things ger more complicated, of course, when the guys find the ghost-trapping bottle tree set up outside of Uncle Leonard's house. Then there's the none-too-neighborly crack house next door. But most disturbing of all is the package hidden below the floorboards of the living room: the desiccated skeleton of a murdered child, wrapped in porn magazines. Leonard can't believe that his Uncle Chester was a child-killing pervert. The police aren't so sure. He enlists Hap's aid to discover the truth in what escalates to a hunt for a nasty serial killer of children, and maybe even something more sinister.
What Lansdale proceeds to spin is not only a top-drawer thriller, but the social protrait of a society in painful evolution. His East Texas is a place of entrenched tradition in painful conflict with new ideas about race relations, gender politics, and more open choices in sexual preference.
In Mucho Mojo, Lansdale grapples with some of the same societal problems concerning abuse and children as Andrew Vachss. Lansdale's sense of noral outrage is no less burning, but he attains a distinctly different effect by filtering the horror through a sense of blackest homor. Joe R. Lansdale keeps his own voice, and it's one well worth listening to and enjoying.
This is no paradigm for a detective novel. But a horrific crime novel? Yes. Lansdale's plot is far less important than the fascinating characters and their respective encounters and interrelationships. Mucho Mojo embodies its own definnition of dark suspense; a tale of evil doings that will make you both laugh and wince, and keep on turning the pages.