Book 9: The Savage Season

I wrapped this last night. Very enjoyable. As always the enjoyable things from these books is Hap's internal monologue and the interplay between himself and Leonard.

Here's an abbreviated plot synopsis from wikipedia

Hap and Leonard are two Texan men who are down on their luck, both working low paying jobs well into their 40's. A former girlfriend of Hap's returns, involving the pair in a scheme to retrieve hundreds of thousands of dollars stolen from a bank and then lost in a creek in the woods in an area which Hap knows quite well. She is involved with a small group of radical leftists who wish to use the money to fund their movement; Hap and Leonard just wish to have enough to retire somewhere pleasant. Her return, as well as her continued involvement with various movement, awakens dormant emotions in Hap, leading him to wonder whether he should have devoted more time to the ideals he felt in the '60's, and whether he had wasted his time in the interim on low-paying, go nowhere jobs.

New Book: The Savage Season

I love Joe R Lansdale's writing and I will read damn near anything he writes just because he wrote it. I've read quite a few of his short story collections by different publishers, I try to check in on the free story he puts online, I'll read the comics he wrote and I'll even manage to slog through works of his I don't really like just so I can get to the interesting bits (like Drive-In 2).

Quite a few years ago I found myself without a job for a short bit so I did what any self-respecting man of newly found leisure would do. I went to my local library and read a lot while waiting for job leads to come in or interviews or the like.

I used a lot of this time to go through and finally read some of the authors I'd heard of but never read, like Philip K Dick, Shirley Jackson, F. Paul Wilson, and then I went through and read some older classical stuff like Oliver Onions, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and the like.

One of the authors I also took the time to read more of was Joe R Lansdale and I got to really get into the breadth of his writing. One of the things I discovered was his Hap and Leonard stories. A series of novels about a pair of East Texas... vigilantes, shit kickers, I don't know if there's really a word for it. Men of sometimes reluctant but furious violence.

My library had most of the books, but not, frustratingly enough, the first one. So when browsing the local mystery section, I found that Black Lizard/Vintage crime is bringing the books back into print, I was elated because I knew there were books I hadn't yet read from this series and now I'd get the chance.

So far, with this book, our first person narrator, Hap has had The Old Flame With A Plea For Help appear in the form of Trudy a flame from the late 60s. There's a million dollars at the bottom of a river and Hap knows the location, while Leonard knows how to dive. There's a crew that already exists to get the money but I've just met them on page 50 so I don't have much in the way to tell you about them, but they're certainly eccentrics in the typical Joe R Lansdale stye.