43 – Joe R. Lansdale and Writing Like Everyone You Know is Dead

Pour yourself a whisky, grab a seat and listen to the best voice in dark fiction tell you some stories. 

Our guest is Joe Lansdale author of so many books I can’t even begin to list them. Oh, ok, I will. Edge of Dark Water, Paradise Sky, The Bottoms, The Thicket, Fender Lizard … “Bubba Ho Tep”, Cold in July … the entire Hap and Leonard series. 

And he joins me to talk about his newest, Moon Lake. A tale of dark nostalgia, small town politics and murder set on the banks of a drowned village. It’s a sun-soaked, shadow-tinged summer read of the best, and most twisted kind. 

As much as Joe is nominally on the show to talk about Moon Lake, he’s a hard man to pin down to mere self-promotion. He has tales to tell and opinions to offer and you’d better goddamn LISTEN!! We discuss blue collar youth, Texas attitude, and whether having some hardship in life makes you a better writer. He tells me how he comes up with his unique metaphors, and why he defended Stephen King when twitter turned against him.

All in all, it’s a friendly conversation about the perils of tribalism, why we should all be a little bit more tolerant, and why choosing stupidity is scary as hell.

This is a bucket-list interview for me.

Enjoy! 

Moon Lake is published by Mulholland Books on June 22nd.

Other books discussed in this episode include:

• Edge of Dark Water (2012), by Joe R. Lansdale
• The Thicket (2013), by Joe R. Lansdale
• Paradise Sky (2015), by Joe R. Lansdale
• “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Mans Back,” in High Cotton: Selected Stories of Joe. R. Lansdale
• “On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with the Dead Folks”, in The Best of Joe R. Lansdale (2010)
• “The Night They Missed the Horror Show”, by Joe R. Lansdale – originally published in Silver Scream, (1988) ed. By David Schow
• Great Expectations, (1860), by Charles Dickens
• The Only Good Indians (2020), by Stephen Graham Jones
• Mongrels (2016), by Stephen Graham Jones 

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Thanks to Adrian Flounders for graphic design.