This review originally appeared at Grimdark Magazine on November 7, 2025.
The Essential Horror of Joe R. Lansdale
By Joe R. Lansdale – Tachyon Publications – October 7, 2025
Review by Robin Marx
Joe R. Lansdale is your favorite horror writer’s favorite horror writer. Widely anthologized and the recipient of no fewer than ten Bram Stoker Awards, it doesn’t feel accurate to characterize the prolific East Texas author as underrated, per se, but to this reader it has long felt like Lansdale should be much more of a household name, up there with Stephen King. Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard series of novels has received popular acclaim from crime fiction fans, but readers who are less plugged into the horror short fiction scene (as opposed to the novel market) are all too often unacquainted with his work. Tachyon Publications is attempting to rectify this injustice with The Essential Horror of Joe R. Lansdale. This convenient volume packages 16 tales spanning the lengthy career of this “Champion Mojo Storyteller.” The stories gathered here are dark, occasionally crude, often bleakly humorous, frequently gross, and always offbeat.
The Essential Horror of Joe R. Lansdale opens strongly with “The Folding Man.” Some teenagers out joyriding after a Halloween party encounter a big black automobile carrying a group of nuns. One of the boys decides to “moon” the nuns as a joke, and the sight of his bare buttocks immediately sends the nuns into a murderous rage. When their savage high-speed pursuit fails to eliminate all the teens, the nuns produce a bizarre mechanical man from the trunk of their car, dispatching it like the robot from The Terminator to hunt down the survivors. Relentlessly paced, filled with graphic violence, and operating by incomprehensible nightmare logic, “The Folding Man” sets the tone for the stories to follow. It lets the reader know that they are now in Lansdale’s world, in which a quirky, chance encounter can rapidly escalate into something horrific and fatal.
Weird Westerns are one subgenre in with Lansdale excels, perhaps due to his Texan background, and this volume includes a pair of them. In “The Hoodoo Man and the Midnight Train,” a gunsmith with some aptitude for folk magic and his apprentice are hired to retrieve the soul of an innocent woman condemned to an eternity as a passenger on a ghostly train guarded by a demonic duelist. The clever and methodical way in which the Hoodoo Man tackles this supernatural predicament feels like a satisfying blend of the early Witcher stories by Andrzej Sapkowski and the Silver John Appalachian folk horror tales by Manly Wade Wellman. “The Hungry Snow” is the second Weird Western, in which a wanderer known as the Reverend Jedidiah Mercer encounters a handful of bedraggled travelers stranded in the Rocky Mountains. Having exhausted their supplies, the hapless survivors have resorted to cannibalism. While the Reverend is understandably cautious around his hungry and desperate new acquaintances, the party as a whole face a greater threat: a prowling Wendigo lurking just beyond the campfire. Like “The Hoodoo Man and the Midnight Train,” “The Hungry Snow” features a level-headed and resourceful protagonist using their expertise and their wits to extract themselves from dire straits.
The Essential Horror of Joe R. Lansdale also includes a pair of post-apocalyptic tales, each with an appropriately unconventional spin. “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back” chronicles the descent into madness of a scientist emerging from an underground shelter into the world he had a hand in destroying. Humanity is all but extinct, and the surface world has been claimed by bizarre, hostile wildlife, forcing the scientist and his estranged wife to shelter together in a lighthouse waiting for the inevitable. While it still feels a little overstuffed to me, like it has more than enough ideas to sustain two separate stories, “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back” was one of the more memorable stories from the George R. R. Martin-edited volume Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse (2015). The frequently anthologized novella “On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folk” is another work of exceptional post-apocalyptic fiction. When a bounty hunter and his ruthless quarry are captured by religious zealots building an undead army, the two enemies must join forces to escape torture and death. Replete with a “Jesusland” theme park, sexy nuns, Mouseketeer ear hat-wearing zombies, and a dash of necrophilia, this story epitomizes Lansdale’s gonzo, deranged appeal.
The second novella collected in The Essential Horror of Joe R. Lansdale is probably his most famous work, due to the well-received 2002 film adaptation by Don Coscarelli (Phantasm, The Beastmaster, etc.): “Bubba Ho-Tep.” Set in an East Texas retirement home, the story is told from the perspective of an elderly man who is either Elvis in his twilight years or an impersonator who has kept up the act so long that his original identity has become foggy. When their fellow residents begin dying under mysterious circumstances, Elvis teams up with a nearly victimized Black man convinced that he is former President John F. Kennedy. They soon learn that a resurrected Egyptian mummy prowls the halls of their old folks’ home looking for souls to devour. With a colorful cast of addled characters and Lansdale’s trademark wit, comedy is very much at the forefront of “Bubba Ho-Tep,” but he doesn’t neglect the horrific aspect of the premise. The reader is reminded that the retirement home residents are incredibly vulnerable, death at the hands of the mummy results in eternal torment, and outside assistance is not coming. The threat may be somewhat ridiculous, but it is a lethal one, nonetheless.
Regular, well-meaning folks in the wrong place at the wrong time are common horror protagonists, but Lansdale also relishes putting the reader in the shoes of the truly despicable. Callous, bigoted, deceitful, or just plain demented. Sometimes they get their just deserts, sometimes they don’t. “My Dead Dog Bobby” is a two-page piece of flash fiction about a young boy playing with his decomposing pet. Lansdale is sometimes lumped in with the old splatterpunk movement—a categorization that’s not always undeserved but also feels slightly reductive—and there’s plenty of grue in this story, but readers may find their initial revulsion for the narrator replaced by pity by the short’s end. “By Bizarre Hands” is a chilling character study of a psychopathic traveling preacher visiting a widow on Halloween with plans to molest the woman’s developmentally disabled daughter. And rather than let readers off easy with the relatively reassuring “Bubba Ho-Tep,” The Essential Horror of Joe R. Lansdale instead concludes with one of the darkest stories in the book: “Night They Missed the Horror Show.” Two racist, idiotic high school boys attempt to kill a dull evening in their Podunk town by dragging the corpse of a dead dog behind their car. Later in the evening they encounter a pair of even crueler men and quickly find themselves in a desperate situation. In his introduction to the piece the author aptly describes it as “a story of the bad guys meeting some really bad guys.” Many of us have had the misfortune of encountering people that just seem “off” or somehow fundamentally broken inside, and Lansdale is uncommonly effective at portraying that sort of ominous individual on the page.
The Essential Horror of Joe R. Lansdale is a worthy retrospective of a bona fide horror master’s extensive career. The folksy, the humorous, the gory, the gonzo, and the pitch-black elements of his body of work are all present and accounted for across this collection’s 16 entries. If you’re new to Lansdale, this is an excellent place to start. If you’re already acquainted with him, this volume likely includes your favorite Lansdale story alongside several less familiar treasures.
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