I've read a lot of Joe R. Lansdale and he doesn't tend to disappoint. Even his most underwhelming work would be considered strong by another hand and it's rare for him to dip in quality. That said, I do wonder how this particular collection will be received by the public, because the title is fair but the subtitle not so much.

Ostensibly this is a collection of crime stories and, if we stretch that genre a little past where it has any business being, that's kinda-sorta true, but a lot of these stories shift well over the border into horror territory, some so far that any thought about what crimes are being committed vanishes in a puff of imagination. I can see some die-hard crime fans reading this and wondering why so many of the stories don't play well to them. Hopefully they remind themselves of the main title, because things do get ugly in this book, pretty much across every story it has to offer, sometimes more ugly than crime fans might expect.

Lansdale, of course, doesn't shrink from that and, quite frankly, embraces it. The first story is crime without a doubt, but it's also violent and vicious. Plus the dog dies. Well, one of them. The other is happy to get testicles to feast on. While attached. Like I said, this may not be for you. If you're not put off, read on because Lansdale is a master storyteller and there are some real gems coming up.

One of my favourites arrives next, a glorious tall tale about two kids driving to collect a dead body. By sheer coincidence, I read this after Josh Rountree's 'The Ballad of Charlie Fish' and there are a host of similarities, even if this story doesn't feature a gillman. No wonder I caught a Lansdale feel to that book. Lansdale wrote something similar as 'Driving to Geromino's Grave'. Even though this one features a bloated corpse left well past its burial date, which stinks as bad as you can imagine, it's also a more lighthearted story, in the Lansdale storyteller style. It's the sort of thing he might recite to us one night, if we happen to be sharing a porch with him and a cooler of beer.

It's firmly crime too, as is 'Santa at the Café', a straightforward story of betrayal but one with neat layers. It's about as close to the opposite of a Christmas feel-good movie as it gets. 'Booty and the Beast' is pure crime too, even if it trawls in Nazi treasure and one of the Virgin Mary's hairs. I was caught up by Lansdale's storytelling here, but not necessarily by his story, and the same goes for a later pure crime story, 'Rainy Weather'. Most of these stories are about human weakness and how low we can go catering to that. Like the title says, things get ugly.

Nobody's going to argue about those stories being crime, but they're about greed and money and things we tend to associate with crime. Serial killers are criminals too, but how their stories unfold can be horror as much as crime and Lansdale tells a lot of horror stories about serial killers here. I don't know how else to look at 'Mr. Bear', for instance, which is a dark story indeed, that gives us a famous anthropomorphic bear that talks and hurls his story into a cesspool. 'The Ears' is short and sweet, done and dusted in only three pages, but it tells all that it needs to. 'I Tell You It's Love' is a love story, but one for serial killers. 'The Shadows, Kith and Kin' is an attempt to get into the mind of a mass shooter.

And Lansdale digs deeper than those. 'Boys Will Be Boys' is clearly part of something bigger, with the introduction here suggesting that it was meant to be part of the novel 'The Nightrunners' but was taken out before publication. It's less a story and more a character study of psycho kids, told in a slice of life way. 'The Phone Woman' is initially a lot more weird than it is horrific; especially as it was based on a real person who barged into Lansdale's house. However, he fictionalises the event into something more twisted, especially given that the character obviously based on himself finds himself a murderer and a necrophile.

And talking of that topic, necrophilia comes up surprisingly often here, because it's also a pivotal part of both 'Dead Sister' and 'Drive In Date'. The former is the better piece but it's also very much a horror tale, told in the niche genre of hardboiled occult detective. That's where the horror genre meets film noir and has its twisted baby. I liked this one a lot and it would easily count amongst my highlights, along with 'Driving to Geronimo's Grave' and 'The Projectionist', a character study that wraps up the book.

Top of the list for me, though, is 'Incident on and Off a Mountain Road', which is the purest horror piece here, so much so that it was adapted by Don Coscarelli, the director of the 'Phantasm' films, as well as one of Lansdale's most outrageous stories, 'Bubba Ho-Tep', into the first episode of the 'Masters of Horror' series of TV movies. It's another serial killer story, but one that's unfolding in private in the woods below a mountain road until a young lady driving too fast crashes into a van and finds herself slap bang in the middle of it. It's cleverly told and cleverly evolved.

All in all, there are nineteen stories here, making this a substantial book even if it doesn't look too daunting. It only runs a little over three hundred pages in trade paperback form but that's not as short as it seems. I've skipped over a few, such as 'The Job', which is short, sweet and twisted; 'Six Finger Jack', which is a slice of life and death without a happy ending; 'Billie Sue', which takes a big left turn but not the one we expect; and 'Dirt Devils', which is a characterful gangster tale set back in the depression era. As always with collections, some are better than others but none disappoint and the best are gems.

If I had to throw out a negative, it wouldn't be about the stories themselves but the presentation they're given in this Tachyon book by the designer John Coulthard. What is that on the page after each story? Is that the imprint of an iPhone that's been dropped in the mud? But hey, if that's the worst thing to say about this book, then it's pretty highly recommended. You won't find anything here about Hap and Leonard but, if you're a Lansdale fan and you're OK with that and a trip into the darkness, then this ought to be right up your dark alley. Just switch the streetlight on first. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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