Tachyon continue to collect Joe R. Lansdale's short stories in themed volumes. The last one I read was 'Things Get Ugly' in 2023, which was dedicated to crime stories. Before that, there was 'Born for Trouble' in 2022, which collated more 'Hap and Leonard' stories. Apparently I missed out on 'In the Mountains' last year, which featured stories inspired by H. P. Lovecraft, only one of which also appears here. There's no other crossover between these volumes, but this does share five stories with 'The Best of Joe R. Lansdale', a Tachyon release back in 2010. Then again, if a horror short is worthy of counting among his best stories, then it would inherently count among his best horror.

These sixteen stories were sourced from across Lansdale's career, the most recent of them being 2020's 'The Hoodoo Man and the Midnight Train', but they skew older, so five are crossovers with 'By Bizarre Hands', his first anthology way back in 1989. The oldest piece here is 'Fish Night', first published in 1982, which Lansdale calls "possibly my first truly good short story". If you're a fan of Lansdale's, you'll find most of his most famous horror stories here, though oddly not 'Incident On and Off a Mountain Road', even though it made it into 'The Best of Joe R. Lansdale'. It's the only surprising omission for me, his other missing Bram Stoker winners being much longer pieces that would have bumped this to a second volume.

If this were a different collection by a different author, I might suggest that not everything here feels like horror, but very little of Lansdale's work honestly fits into a single genre. He points out in his introduction here, which follows an excellent one by Joe Hill, that some of these stories are intended to be horror, while others contain "the furniture of horror" but have other intentions in mind than horror. To him, all his stories are just stories, whatever genre or genres they ended up falling most naturally into. He talks more about each individually on the page before they start.

For instance, 'The Hoodoo Man and the Midnight Train' and 'The Hungry Snow' are clearly weird westerns. 'Fish Night' is a surreal dark fantasy. 'Mister Weed-Eater' could have played well as an episode of 'The Twilight Zone' and so could 'Not from Detroit' if it was longer. 'Night They Missed the Horror Show' is certainly horrific but it's really general fiction, as is 'By Bizarre Hands'. 'Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back' is a post-apocalyptic story that's at once horror, fantasy and science fiction. 'Bubba Ho-Tep' and 'On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks' should be classified under a genre of Joe R. Lansdale, because they're quintessentially him, dancing into and out of other genres like they were laid out as a game of hopscotch.

Frankly, there are more stories here that go elsewhere here than stay as pure horror. Surely the most obvious is the opener, 'The Folding Man', which won a Bram Stoker. It explores the black car idea, through Halloween partiers mooning a black car filled with nuns. The latter pursue and set the creepy folding man on them. It's an excellent story and it's pure urban legend horror. 'God of the Razor' is pure horror too. Richards seeks antiques and Klein has a place full of them, although he hasn't been in there in twenty years. Richards is soon stuck on a rickety staircase between the flooded basement and a weird dude talking about weirder things. It's surreal, nightmarish and it will guarantee that you become more aware of your surroundings at all times.

After that, perhaps only 'The Bleeding Shadow' comes close to pure horror. It's cosmic horror and it's very creepy indeed, even if it's phrased as a blues legend, something Lansdale has built other stories off, including at least one 'Hap and Leonard' novel. It also boasts some of his most joyous and most quintessentially Joe R. Lansdale descriptions, though such creatures are dotted around this book like confetti. There's a hotel that "was nice if you were blind in one eye and couldn't see out the other" and, inside, Tootie "looked like someone had set him on fire and then beat out the flames with a two-by-four." This is the effortless sort of storytelling that Lansdale flows out of his body like sweat, making us feel like we're sitting on his porch late in the evening listening to him conjure these tales out of the east Texan mist.

All these stories are worthy, even the couple that are over and done in a couple of pages, namely 'My Dead Dog Bobby' and 'Dog, Cat and Baby'. The former is incredibly wrong but it escalates in a majestic and ridiculously frequent way for something only two pages long. The later may be even shorter and sweeter and it rings very true. The one I looked forward to the most, though, was the one I should have read years ago, 'Bubba Ho-Tep', given that I'm a huge fan of the movie, which is, in my heretical opinion, Bruce Campbell's best film. It's as glorious as it should be and shockingly similar to the movie, the only real difference that there are a couple more characters that didn't make it to the big screen.

It's hard to choose favourites though, because the quality is so high. While Joe Hill suggests that 'Mister Weed-Eater' is the best of them and Lansdale considers the closer, 'Night They Missed the Horror Show' as his best of his own stories, I'd choose others, 'The Hoodoo Man and the Midnight Train' and 'Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back' in particular. It's telling that the latter was nominated for a World Fantasy Award rather than a Bram Stoker. Then again, 'On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks' won both a Stoker and a British Fantasy Award.

'The Hoodoo Man and the Midnight Train' features Zach, a gunmaker and hoodoo man who owes a hundred good deeds to repent for something bad but still has one more to go when a customer walks in with a story. It's powerfully done and wrapped up as perfectly as a story could be, but the imagery is wonderful too, from the toadlike things that seep off the Midnight Train as it stops for people, to the mirror that shows not only the person looking into it but the supernatural baggage that they carry with them.

'Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back' is a gift that keeps on giving, full of guilt, madness and love, told so visually I'm surprised that nobody's filmed it. Mary tattoos Rae onto Paul's back in a lighthouse two decades after a nuclear war sent them underground. She hates him for working on the missiles that killed their daughter and pours that into her art, as they watch mutated whales prowl a dry ocean and hide from roses that want to eat them. The stitches are Rae's eyes and he tears them every time he practices tae kwon do so that she bleeds tears. It's searing and poetic.

Those would be my two choices, but I could believe readers choosing any one of the sixteen in this collection. I don't believe any are new to this volume, so diehard fans will have encountered them all before in collections, anthologies and small press publications. Others may only have read the most frequently collected stories, so most of these will still be new to them. It's fair to say that, if one of these stories was already collected in an earlier anthology, it was probably collected more than once.

For reference, five of these are also in 'By Bizarre Hands', which I should pull off the shelf to read, some other early stories mentioned but not included here. Five are 'Electric Gumbo'. Four are in 'Mama Lansdale's Youngest Boy' and 'Bestsellers Guaranteed'. Three are in 'Writer of the Purple Rage'. 'Bubba Ho-Tep' and 'On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks' are two of the four novellas in 'The Long Ones'. And seven are in 'High Cotton'. However, even if you've read all those, which isn't likely, you'll still have missed four of these stories. Grab this book. It's essential. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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