The October 1988 issue of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone Magazine had a big feature about Splatterpunk authors. Editor Tappan King was reportedly trying to create a movement.
There were photos of authors from a convention who were purported to be Splatterpunks: John Skipp, Craig Spector and David J. Schow, of course. R.C. Matheson and Ray Garton. I can buy all of that, but Joe R. Lansdale was proclaimed to be one of the Splat Pack. Even more ridiculously, so was Robert McCammon.
A letter from Lansdale was printed in a subsequent issue saying he was not a Splatterpunk and the only movement he was involved in was a Joe R. Lansdale movement. It’s been nearly forty years, and I’d say he’s been successful.
Joe’s writing has been all over the literary map. From horror to pulp adventure, out-and-out westerns, hard suspense, humor, SF, YA, you name it, he’s probably tried it.
An early Lansdale title, The Nightrunners, is almost certainly his hardest and nastiest full-length novel. Had he continued in the same vein he might well have become a legendary Splatterpunk.
I can imagine a young Joe seated at his typewriter, throwing all caution and restrain to the wind. The Nightrunners is a little crude and a lot disturbing. Like many writers early in their careers, he seemed to be trying to shock his readers.
As the novel begins we meet a vicious group of young delinquents that make the kids from Blackboard Jungle look like the Mouseketeers. The leader, Clyde, is a soulless monster with a nasty grudge against nearly everyone and everything. He rapes a teacher and is caught and arrested. Clyde hangs himself in his cell, but his work is not yet finished.
Or is it? Clyde seems to be driven by a supernatural creature called the God of the Razor, and he has possessed the second of command in his gang. Lansdale is careful to allow readers to decide whether Clyde’s spirit has survived or is it merely in the mind of his partner.
This is hard stuff. A marriage of brutal suspense fiction from the heyday of Gold Medal and what was termed the New Horror of the day. Joe pulls few punches and the language may be a little rough for today’s readers.
There has always been a strong anti-racism chord in Joe’s fiction and it’s present in The Nightrunners. His antagonists are not nice racists and they speak as the real thing does. They also tend to be as stupid as racists in the real world.
The Nightrunners is a hard, mean, ruthless novel, and Joe has learned a degree of restraint in the ensuing years. He managed to do so without becoming boring or predictable. Lansdale is as outrageous as ever, and his readers adore him for it.
This novel is currently out of print in dead tree form, but it’s available as an ebook and an audiobook. I won’t call it his best book, but The Nightrunners is an important step in the evolution of one of today’s greatest writers.
Mark Sieber learned to love horror with Universal, Hammer, and AIP movies, a Scholastic edition of Poe’s Eight Tales of Terror, Sir Graves Ghastly Presents, The Twilight Zone, Shirley Jackson’s The Daemon Lover, The Night Stalker, and a hundred other dark influences. He came into his own in the great horror boom of the 1980’s, reading Charles L. Grant, F. Paul Wilson, Ray Russell, Skipp and Spector, David J. Schow, Stephen King, and countless others. Meanwhile he spent as many hours as possible at drive-in theaters, watching slasher sequels, horror comedies, monster movies, and every other imaginable type of exploitation movie. When the VHS revolution hit, he discovered the joys of Italian and other international horror gems. Trends come and go, but he still enjoys having the living crap scared out of him. Cemetery Dance has published his nonfiction collections He Who Types Between the Rows: A Decade of Horror Drive-In and He Who Types Between the Rows 2: Horror Drive-In Will Never Die. He can be reached at [email protected], and at www.horrordrive-in.com.
