I got depression era historical thrillers. I got great tightly paced mysteries with diverse casts. That wasn’t what I got, or at least not all of it. Maybe the occasional laugh out loud moment. Funny irreverent horror that played with horror tropes in interesting ways. I expected something like Max Brooks or Christopher Moore. The day after a breathless friend showed up at my house with a DVD copy of Bubba Ho-Tep and an urgent “you’ve got to see this”, I went into my bookstore job and grabbed half a dozen of his novels.

Most of Lansdale’s work is sort of neither.įor fans who first encountered him on the big screen there is a lot of catching up to do, but his work is so diverse that coming to it from almost anywhere is misleading. At the root of things Bubba Ho-Tep is both a horror movie and a comedy. Those are all hallmarks of Lansdale’s writing.Īnd yet, I can’t help but feel that Bubba Ho-Tep isn’t the best introduction to Lansdale’s work. The characters are treated with respect and the story has moments of surprising tenderness. The depiction of East Texas is vivid, detailed and feels very familiar if you’ve spent any time in the region. It quickly became a cult classic.īubba Ho-Tep is profane, funny, absurd and genuinely scary. It was the type of beautifully strange movie that develops a community of appreciation. Lansdale fans whose first contact with the writer was through the 2002 Bruce Campbell-Ossie Davis movie Bubba Ho-Tep in which a pair of retirees (who may or may not actually be Elvis and JFK) fight a cowboy-hatted mummy from their beds in an East Texas retirement home. I’m guessing here, but I suspect that I am one of many Joe R.

Bubba Ho-Tep by Joe R. Lansdale