Book Review

By Derryll White

Lansdale, Joe R. (2016). Honky Tonk Samurai.

“All dogs go to heaven. All cats go to hell.” — Hap Collins.

This is the ninth novel in Joe R. Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard series, now also a TV series. I have never read him before or even heard of him. For any reader hooked on pace and action ‘Honky Tonk Samurai’ is a very good fit. There is a high degree of honour, trust, brotherhood and love – all interspersed throughout a long novel. Lansdale keeps the reader fully engaged.

For anyone who reads Carl Hiaasen the ongoing humour in this novel will be familiar. Lansdale is consistently funny in a situational kind of way. There are bits of streetwise coarseness that may go over the heads of some, but any reader recognizing a ‘camel toe’ will be at home here. The bond between Hap and Leonard (a white man and a black man who consider themselves brothers) lifts this novel above the huge body of action-genre books. Their friendship is the kind almost all men aspire to but few will admit to.

There are shortcomings. The story is not anchored in any political or economic reality. It does not have a wider context. Lansdale does, however, capture the gritty nastiness and closed society of rural Texas. He makes it real and in doing so gives depth and solidness to the character of Hap and Leonard.

The story is a lot of fun. There is absurdity and a sense of noir that pushes the more extreme action into a surreal blend of fantasy and futility in considering just what man is capable of. Lots of scatology, but also some deeper veins about the worth of animals and the nature of love. All in, the read is wild and funny.

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Excerpts from the novel:

THE ACTUAL DIFFERENCE – It’s why I prefer dogs to cats. Cats aren’t independent, they’re just entitled assholes who want to be fed and do nothing. They’re your owners. A dog just loves you. It’s not about ownership or anything like that. They are sincere as death and taxes. They’re the best creatures on the earth.

OUR SUMMER – The heat moved across the morning like an invisible truck, heavy and crushing, and with a hotter engine than the day before. It was the kind of heat that made me feel short and fat and close to the ground. It made me thirsty and made my stomach heavy as lead. I wished for rain, but knew if it came, even if it cooled things, when it passed it would be hot again and, worse yet, humid. Nothing helpful but the arrival of winter.

CENTRED – If it’s your first time or two doing something like that, going into the midst of danger and uncertainty, you have tunnel vision. You see what’s in front of you as if looking down the length of a tunnel. Everything to the right and left of you is a black wall. But if you’ve been there before, it’s not that way. On some level, like the samurai of old, you have accepted your death. You are neither there to win or to lose. You are there to be in the moment. Things may be slow, but they are viewed wider with experience, not inside that fearful tunnel of the neophyte. That’s how it was with me. I could see clearly. I could feel clearly.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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