The Bottoms
by Joe R. Lansdale
Summary
Harry Crane is an old man in a rest home when he tells it, but in 1933 he was eleven, in the East Texas river bottoms, on the day he and his little sister Tom found the body: a Black woman, mutilated, bound to a tree with barbed wire down by the Sabine. Their father Jacob, farmer, barber and local constable, does the thing that makes the novel: he decides a murdered Black woman deserves an investigation, in a county where his neighbours, the doctor who will not autopsy the body, the men at the barbershop, the Klan organizing openly, regard the decision as somewhere between eccentric and treasonous.
Lansdale runs the boy's story and the murder story as one weave. More women die, white as well as Black, and the bottoms fill with the children's mythology of the Goat Man, the horned thing said to haunt the swinging bridge, which Harry half believes and the reader is allowed to weigh against the human explanations, none of them less monstrous. The middle of the book contains the lynching, of the gentle Black man the mob prefers to the truth, rendered with a directness that is the novel's moral floor: Harry watches, his father fails to stop it, and the failure remakes them both. The real killer, when Harry finally understands what he has been looking at, has been inside the story's household radius all along.
The voice is the achievement, East Texas oral telling with Lansdale's timing, funny in the exact places that make the darkness darker.
Around three hundred and thirty pages.
Best for readers who want the Depression South's crime novel with the mythology left in, Mockingbird territory reworked by a writer who never lets decency win cheap.
Historical Context & Significance
The Bottoms won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2001, the mainstream coronation of Joe R. Lansdale, who had spent two decades as East Texas's genre polymath, splatterpunk landmarks, the Hap and Leonard crime series, Bubba Ho-Tep and scores of stories, all written in the voice this book runs at full length; the Mockingbird comparisons began with the earliest reviews, with the caveat admirers add, that Lansdale's version declines the comfort.
The novel sits at the centre of his mojo storytelling project, the bottoms reappearing across his loose run of Depression era books, and its lynching chapter is anthologised in discussions of how genre fiction handles documented atrocity.
Lansdale's cult went institutional afterwards, the Hap and Leonard television series, festival retrospectives, the Texas Literary Hall of Fame, while the man kept his martial arts school in Nacogdoches; the Edgar remains the odd formal medal on the most informal shelf in American crime writing.