Joe R. Lansdale
Paradise Sky
2015, Mulholland Books
Joe R. Lansdale is one of my comfort food writers, even if he pretty much never writes about anything comfortable. For over forty years now, he’s shown us dark, seedy underworlds, mostly around East Texas, but he can find ’em in other places, too. He gives us villains who freeze your veins. He tells us about the frightening outcome of real and sudden violence. He’s never flinches when it comes to exploring racism at its most hideous. He makes you look at it close so that you can’t ignore it.
He’s also got one of those great Texan voices that I love so much. It’s perfectly smoked barbecue. It comes off as simple with smartass quips galore, but it’s also wise. Paradise Sky pulls off that Mark Twain trick in which our first-person narrator is from a humble place and his grammar maybe ain’t perfect, but he’s a brilliant observer and a natural wit. He’s got the kind of smarts that can’t be taught in a classroom.
Paradise Sky is big and epic and the product of a writer who’s read exhaustively about its Old West setting. He knows exactly how you cooked food when you camped out for the night in the middle of Missouri in the 1800s. He knows all about the guns of the time and what each designs’ strengths and weaknesses were–and he makes you care about that because it’s all vital to our narrator, a black sharpshooter, the son of former slaves (and a slave of himself when he was very young), from the horse-and-saloon days.
Lansdale loves the Old West too much to lie about it. He also tells you about the ugly truths. In fact, he can’t stop talking about that. Lansdale breaks your nose and blackens your eye with it.
In this book, our guy here goes from being as low as a person can go–hunted, lost, uneducated–to becoming a legend, a hero celebrated in dime novels and shrouded in myth, and who lived longer than any smart gambler might have bet that he would.
To the world, he goes by three different names, but we come to know him like he’s our own brother.
He starts off as Willie Jackson back when he was young and didn’t know shit and got caught one day looking a few seconds too long at a white woman’s ass as she was bent over doing laundry. That one tiny, little moment changes EVERYTHING. It’s what causes the whole book to happen. That woman’s husband, a charmer named Ruggert, sees it all and goes bugfuck right away. A black man checking out his wife’s rear view is a capital crime and if Ruggert had his way, Willie would swing from a tree by supper time. Willie escapes this fate, so Ruggert’s mob instead kills his family and their livestock.
Willie runs and runs and eventually runs into an intellectual who takes him in and teaches him three important lessons: how to read, how to write and how to shoot. And he teaches him well. When that ends (also violently), Willie changes his name to Nat Love. It’s a sleek, sexy name to match his new confidence–or at least the confidence that he wants. It’s a reinvention. Also, it’s a way to maybe throw Ruggert off his trail. (Let’s also mention that Ruggert’s story over time mutates from Willie/Nat having merely checked out his wife’s butt to him having raped her.)
From here, Nat goes from fleeing this danger to actively seeking revenge. He goes from prey to predator. Along the way, he acquires a third name: Deadwood Dick. He didn’t come up with that one. It’s given to him by others when word of him being the best shot in the sloppy, muddy, shithole town known as Deadwood, South Dakota (one of a few places in this story where Nat travels) gets around. It would be his name in the books based on his exploits.
In this book, Willie/Nat/Dick tells the real story behind the legend. The tragedies, the mistakes, the defeats, and the occasional victories, as well as his encounters with the likes of Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane and Bass Reeves, He doesn’t seem to know how to lie. He tells his story as truly and accurately as he handles his rifle, like it’s all one thing. If he lies to us today, he’ll lie to himself tomorrow and maybe not be able to aim so well. It all goes together. If you suck at one important thing, you’re gonna suck at every important thing. We trust his intensity.
What I’m trying to say is that Joe R. Lansale is just fuckin’ good. This book kicked me in the head about fifteen times.
There are a few different kinds of Lansdale novels.
You’ve got the bizarre, pulpy, gory stuff such as Bubba and The Cosmic Blood-Suckers and the Drive-In trilogy and any number of kick-your-ass short stories. I love those. Lansdale is fearlessly freaky. He rips your eyeballs out of your head and then throws ’em into the Sabine River.
Then you’ve got his Hap & Leonard series of books, which he started in 1990. They’re maybe his most beloved works. The series is still going today. Two bad luck magnets (a liberal, white, ex-hippie and a black, gay Republican, joined at the hip like brothers) in a small East Texas town get into one misadventure after another, each of which explores another ugly side of the American south. They’re fast-moving and entertaining and violent and shine a bright light on Old South racist tradition.
Then there are his more “mainstream” novels. Lansdale’s high-reaching “literary” side. Many of these works are period pieces. They often tell the story of a young person or some good-hearted misfit making their way in a cruel and hopeless world. That’s The Bottoms and Edge of Dark Water–and Paradise Sky
Meanwhile, for big Lansdale readers, all of the different “categories” of his work mix together. He tells his freaky stories with a real writer’s presence and eye for detail. Meanwhile, his more “respectable” books often bring a pulp writer’s flair for the gruesome and sensational. Sometimes nobody wins. Sometimes there is no clean victory in a horrible world in which your race always makes you a second-class citizen no matter what accomplishment you may have to your name.
Paradise Sky is a Western epic. It’s also a comedy here and there. And it’s also, in its own way, a horror story. It plays likes several genres over its epic ride.