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Joe R. Lansdale |
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Joe R. Lansdale is the author of 50 novels and 400 shorter works, including stories, essays, reviews, film and TV scripts, stage plays, introductions and magazine articles, as well as a book of poetry. His work has been made into films, animation, comics, and he has won numerous awards, including an Edgar, the Raymond Chandler lifetime achievement award, numerous Bram Stoker Awards, Lifetime Horror Award, and the Spur Award. Petrified Dreams (Little, Brown, October 6, 2026) is the 15th installment and the conclusion of the series following the dynamic detective duo Hap and Leonard. Women are going missing across the Deep South, and Hap and Leonard zero in on a horrific, chimerical villain protected and abetted by Texas's most powerful figures.
Handsell readers your book:
Petrified Dreams is the last in my long-running Hap and Leonard series. They've earned a rest. First book, Savage Season, first appeared in 1990 and was not planned to be a series. I started this novel about a guy named Hap Collins, and this other guy, Leonard Pine, showed up, and I found I didn't want to let him go. They became a duo. Leonard was Black, gay, and macho as a horse whip. Hap was straight, and in his mind, a bit of a player, but one that often got played. He and Leonard were political opposites, with Leonard being conservative and Hap being idealistic with a semi-hippy past. They were also as close as brothers. They clicked for me. I thought it was one and done, but years later I wrote the second, and along with other novels I've written, these guys kept showing up and readers were as glad to see them as I was. The latest, Petrified Dreams, is the end of the ride, and it's a dark, funny, and quirky one. It reaches into you and tugs at bones and soul. Or so I hope. I was glad to end on this unusual note.
On your nightstand now:
Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie. Never read it, never saw the show, and I decided to give it a try. It's charming and fun, if of its time, but that adds to it, warts and all. Nice writing. Also reading a large collection of Tarzan comics and rereading a collection of Rudyard Kipling short stories.
Favorite book when you were a child:
A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs was my favorite, and is still my sentimental favorite. I also loved Edgar Allan Poe's short story collection; the Iliad and the Odyssey; and The Jungle Book by Kipling. Late teens I found an unabridged Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird became my favorite novel, and still is. But the others I love as well. Also Ernest Hemingway's short stories, everything by Flannery O'Connor, the first 20 years of Ray Bradbury especially. Raymond Chandler's books, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain. I was also a comic book fanatic, and they were my first love and taught me to read and how to blend genres when I begin writing. Batman would be the most influential, and I got to write in the Batman universe for Batman: The Animated Series, as well as some prose stories. And lots of other comics.
Your top five authors:
This varies. But, Flannery O'Connor, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, Ray Bradbury. Another day the list might change. I read and reread these authors, and others constantly.
Current authors would be S.A. Cosby, Joe Hill, and Owen King. Gabino Iglesias. Anything from Kathleen Kent. Really enjoying May Cobb's work A Likable Woman, and a big fan of Ace Atkins, specifically Don't Let the Devil Ride and Everybody Wants to Rule the World. I also really enjoyed Freida McFadden's The Tenant but haven't read any of the others. It's tough to pick favorites and again, it varies day to day and based on my mood. But these are all people I know I can pick up the book and have a great time with it, whatever it is.
Book you've faked reading:
There aren't any.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Flannery O'Connor's collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find. Big fan of Stephen Graham Jones's The Only Good Indians.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Most Ace double science fiction novels.
Book you hid from your parents:
Never hid any. They were okay with me reading.
Book that changed your life:
To Kill a Mockingbird and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn helped me understand prejudice. Their world was my Southern world, and I got what they were saying. People who want to remove these books from libraries because they tell harsh truths are idiots. Those are exactly the books we need.
Favorite line from a book:
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." That's the last line of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. I had to look it up to be exact, but it is for me the most beautiful line in literature. There are some other good ones, but that one I adore.
Five books you'll never part with:
A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor; Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler; The October Country by Ray Bradbury; A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs; and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, and to cheat, I'll add Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.