Joe R. Lansdale
Bubba and the Cosmic Blood-Suckers
2017, Subterranean Press
Joe R. Lansdale gave my favorite piece of writing advice ever when he said “Write like everyone you know is dead”.
Don’t have anything to prove. Don’t worry about what the people you know might think about you. None of that shit needs to be on your mind at all. No one can tell a writer how to be good, but you can tell them how to be free.
And clearly Lansdale follows his own advice because that’s the only way that a man in his 60s who’s been steadily publishing novels and short fiction since 1980 (if not a little earlier) plops out with a profane piece of pure nutzoid pulp like this.
So, it’s the prequel to Landsdale’s Bubba Ho-Top and while this story isn’t–and can’t be–as totally left-field as that one, it does its best and brings Lansdale’s well-honed drive across an intriguing beginning, an explosive second act and a clever conclusion. The violence is good and splattery, the horror elements are downright ghastly and the humor is a puredee specimen of that very Texan brand of smartass that Lansdale seems to spin out effortlessly. If this was a B-movie, you’d rent it more than once. And not just for the scene where Elvis Presley has sex with a ghost.
So, in this weird world, Elvis is not only a superstar in music and movies, but he’s also secretly a fighter of supernatural threats. It’s set in the early 70s when Elvis isn’t yet in his fat, white-jumpsuit phase, but he’s getting there. He has discovered the fried peanut butter and banana sandwich. Colonel Tom Parker is his boss and reports directly to President Richard Nixon on the latest in the world of ghosts and goblins. You see, Elvis’s sheer charisma is very attractive to the supernatural. He’s a magnet for this shit and Parker ropes him into serving in the task force by claiming to have the soul of his dead mother trapped in a bag.
The villain is an uber-demon from another dimension with an army of minions who kidnap people, bend them into bone-breaking, horrifically painful, contorted cubes and slowly feed off their lifeforce.
And only Elvis and small crew of other gifted people can stop it.
If you think that sounds ridiculous, you’re right, but Lansdale sells it to us on a bed of his usual no-boundaries humor, full of the sexual, the scatalogical and the totally rude. A great writer can make you buy anything. Their voice carries you through it. And that’s what Lansdale does here. This is a campy, scary, absurd Halloween party of a book. I’m glad that I got to go.