Joe R. Lansdale

The end of the 1980s. Drive-in movie culture is mostly dead with one significant exception: THE ORBIT DRIVE-IN. A drive-in theater so large it houses multiple stories-high screens that fill the sky, and can hold four thousand cars and all the people who can squeeze in them. It’s a lit city that fills to the brim on Friday nights, crowds gather for the Dusk-to-Dawn Horror Shows. Horns honk, BBQ grills sizzle, people yell and act the fool, ready for...

Hap Collins and Leonard Pine are best friends, yet they couldn't be more different. Hap is an east Texas white-boy with a weakness for Texas women. Leonard is a gay, black Vietnam vet. Together, they steer up more commotion than a fire storm. But that's just the way they like it. So when an ex-flame of Hap's returns promising a huge score. Hap lets Leonard in on the scam, and that's when things get interesting. Chockfull of action and laughs, Savage...

Leonard is still nursing the injuries he sustained in the duo's last wild undertaking when he learns that his Uncle Chester has passed. Hap is of course going to be there for his best friend, and when the two are cleaning up Uncle Chester's dilapidated house, they uncover a dark little secret beneath the house's rotting floor boards-a small skeleton buried in a trunk. Hap wants to call the police. Leonard, being a black man in east Texas, persuades...

"Daniel Russell was only thirteen years old when his father tried to kill them both by driving their car into Moon Lake. Miraculously surviving the crash and growing into adulthood, Daniel returns to the site of this traumatic incident in the hopes of recovering his father's car and bones. As he attempts to finally put to rest the memories that have plagued him for years, he discovers something even more shocking among the wreckage that has ties to...

Lansdale shows himself at the top of his form in this varied collection with something to suit every reader's taste. Half of the book's eight selections are novellas, two of which grew into novels. The title story, which Lansdale expanded into his Edgar Award winning "The Bottoms", is a haunting coming-of-age tale that evokes the fiction of Harper Lee and Davis Grubb in its account of a child in a small Texas town and her first confrontation with...

Young Willie is on the run, having fled his small Texas farm when an infamous local landowner murdered his father. A man named Loving takes him in and trains him in the fine arts of shooting, riding, reading, and gardening. When Loving dies, Willie re-christens himself Nat Love in tribute to his mentor, and heads west. In Deadwood, South Dakota Territory, Nat becomes a Buffalo Soldier and is befriended by Wild Bill Hickok. After winning a famous...

"Nat Love has had enough adventures for ten men. From son of a former slave, to buffalo soldier, to gun hand, to Marshal for Hanging Judge Parker. Now, entering old age, he's a train porter. A job he's happy to have, but not exactly the cream of his life. And then an unlikely train robbery and a moment of bravery gives him an opportunity to relive his past and perhaps redeem his wayward son. He's still got the skills, but he's also older and stiffer,...

Dispatched to repossess a Cadillac from a deadbeat pet-cemetery owner and his beautiful wife, an unscrupulous used-car salesman embarks on an affair that tests the limits of his character. From the Edgar Award-winning author of the Hap and Leonard series, a hard-boiled novel set in 1960s Texas in which a no-nonsense car salesman faces a tempting decision, a dangerous deal, and an alluring affair. Ed Edwards is in the used car business, a business...

Ten authors have created a series of varied, compelling narratives, each inspired by one of McKean's extraordinary paintings.

"What leads one person to collect stamps and another coins, one fine art and another butterflies? Who can say? But one thing is certain: no one covets like a collector; and a truly dedicted collector will ignore the other nine commandments, too, in his quest for his personal Holy Grail. From Joyce Carol Oates' tale of the ultimate Marilyn Monroe collectible to Dennis Lehand's bookseller with a penchant for other people's tragic correspondence, from...