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.