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  • Book cover of Sunset and Sawdust

    In the middle of a cyclone, beautiful, red-haired Sunset Jones shoots her husband Pete dead when he tries to beat and rape her. To Camp Rapture’s general consternation, Sunset’s mother-in-law arranges for her to take over from Pete as town constable. As if that weren’t hard enough to swallow in depression era east Texas, Sunset actually takes the job seriously, and her investigation into a brutal double murder pulls her into a maelstrom of greed, corruption, and unspeakable malice. It is a case that will require a well of inner strength she never knew she had. Spirited and electrifying, Sunset and Sawdust is a mystery and a tale like nothing you’ve read before.

  • Book cover of The Best of Joe R. Lansdale

    Godzilla’s in a twelve-step program. A soul-sucking Mummy stalks Elvis and John F. Kennedy. Joe Bob Briggs has a moral dilemma: If your girlfriend turns zombie on you, what do you do? And that’s the tame stuff. In this red-hot collection from world-champion Mojo storyteller Joe R. Lansdale, you’ll find his best, most outrageous stories. The high priest of Texan weirdness does it all: horror, mystery, satire, suspense, and even Westerns. Prepare to be offended, shocked, and cackling like a crazed redneck. Featuring five Bram Stoker Award–winning stories, this career retrospective contains some of Lansdale’s rarer work, his nonfiction forays into drive-in theaters and B-movies, and the novella Bubba Ho-Tep, later made into a cult-classic major motion picture. Come on in—the weirdness is fine.

  • Book cover of The Big Blow

    "Local fighter, future legend, Jack Johnson versus a professional street fighter brought in to put the black upstart in his place. Whorehouses, gambling, racial tension, the intersection between myth, history, legend and reality. The hurricane of the century is coming to destroy it all."--Jacket.

  • Book cover of The Bottoms

    This Edgar Award winner is "equal parts morality tale and page-turning thriller" (Denver Post)—classic American storytelling in its truest, darkest, and most affecting form, with echoes of William Faulkner and Harper Lee. Its 1933 in East Texas and the Depression lingers in the air like a slow moving storm. When a young Harry Collins and his little sister stumble across the body of a black woman who has been savagely mutilated and left to die in the bottoms of the Sabine River, their small town is instantly charged with tension. When a second body turns up, this time of a white woman, there is little Harry can do from stopping his Klan neighbors from lynching an innocent black man. Together with his younger sister, Harry sets out to discover who the real killer is, and to do so they will search for a truth that resides far deeper than any river or skin color.

  • Book cover of Act of Love

    Telling the tautly plotted story of a modern Jack the Ripper's spree in Houston, Lansdale creates a powerful combination of crime, police work, and social commentary--all with an eye for graphic detail. Act of Love, his first novel, is a collector's item for Lansdale's old fans and essential reading for his new ones.

  • Book cover of A Fine Dark Line

    It is the summer of 1958 in Dewmont, Texas, a town the great American postwar boom passed by. The kids listen to rockabilly on the radio and waste their weekends at the Dairy Queen. And an undetected menace simmers under the heat that clings to the skin like molasses. . . For thirteen-year-old Stanley Mitchel, the end of innocence comes with his discovery of the mysterious long-ago demise of two very different young women. In his quest to unravel the truth about their tragic fates, Stanley finds a protector in Buster Lighthorse Smith, a black, retired Indian-reservation cop and a sage on the finer points of Sherlock Holmes, the blues, and life's faded dreams. But not every buried thing stays dead. And on one terrifying night of rushing creek water and thundering rain, an arcane, murderous force will rise from the past to threaten the Stanley and everything he holds dear. Vintage Lansdale, A FINE DARK LINE brims with exquisite suspense, powerful characterizations, and the vibrant evocation of a lost time.

  • Book cover of Captains Outrageous

    Hap Collins and Leonard Pine, the bad old boys from Mucho Mojo and Bad Chili return for another rough and ready adventure south of the border.

  • Book cover of Captains Outrageous

    Hap and Leonard is now a Sundance TV series starring James Purefoy and Michael Kenneth Williams. Hap Collins and Leonard Pine find mucho trouble, this time in Mexico, when they come face to face with a nudist mobster, his seven-foot strong-arm, a octogenarian knife-touting fisherman, and, somehow, an armadillo. When Hap Collins saves the life of his employer's daughter, he is rewarded with a Caribbean Cruise, and he convinces his best friend Leonard Pine to come along. However, when the cruise sails on without them, stranding them in Playa del Carmen with nothing but their misfortune and Leonard's new ridiculous hat, the two quickly find themselves drawn into a vicious web of sordid violence. When they return to East Texas, they find that trouble has beaten them back, and when trouble's around it doesn't take long for Hap and Leonard to find it.

  • Book cover of The Thicket

    Now a Tubi original film starring Peter Dinklage and Juliette Lewis, this rip-roaring adventure set at the dark dawn of the East Texas oil boom is the perfect introduction to Joe R. Lansdale, whose work has been called "as funny and frightening as anything that could have been dreamed up by the Brothers Grimm — or Mark Twain" (New York Times Book Review). Jack Parker thought he'd already seen his fair share of tragedy. His grandmother was killed in a farm accident when he was barely five years old. His parents have just succumbed to the smallpox epidemic sweeping turn-of-the-century East Texas -- orphaning him and his younger sister, Lula. Then catastrophe strikes on the way to their uncle's farm, when a traveling group of bank-robbing bandits murder Jack's grandfather and kidnap his sister. With no elders left for miles, Jack must grow up fast and enlist a band of heroes the likes of which has never been seen if his sister stands any chance at survival. But the best he can come up with is a charismatic, bounty-hunting dwarf named Shorty, a grave-digging son of an ex-slave named Eustace, and a street-smart woman-for-hire named Jimmie Sue who's come into some very intimate knowledge about the bandits (and a few members of Jack's extended family to boot). In the throes of being civilized, East Texas is still a wild, feral place. Oil wells spurt liquid money from the ground. But as Jack's about to find out, blood and redemption rule supreme. In The Thicket, award-winning novelist Joe R. Lansdale lets loose like never before, in an action-packed adventure that's equal parts True Grit and Stand by Me.

  • Book cover of Devil Red

    Hap and Leonard is now a Sundance TV series starring James Purefoy and Michael Kenneth Williams. If there’s one thing Hap Collins and Leonard Pine like, it’s trouble—and they especially like getting paid to find it. So when their friend and sometime boss Marvin Harmon asks the boys to look into a cold-case double homicide, they’re happy to oblige. It turns out that both victims were set to inherit some serious money, and one of them ran with an honest-to-goodness vampire cult. The more closely Hap and Leonard look over the crime-scene photos, the more trouble they see. The image of a red devil’s head painted on a tree is just the beginning—a little research turns up a slew of murders with that same fiendish signature. And if things aren’t weird enough, Leonard has taken to wearing a deestalker cap . . . Will this be the case that finally sends Hap over the edge?