HandHeldCrime Subscribe Help Issues eBooks ... Home Review of Joe R. Lansdale's THE BOTTOMS by Victoria Esposito-Shea Mysterious Press
328 pp.
ISBN 0-89296-704-8 Well, no. It's not badly written or anything, but it's not. . . special. And it doesn't help that the book hasn't quite decided what exactly it wants to becountry noir, or coming of age novel, or mystery, or some combinationand as a result, it doesn't do any of these things with real conviction. THE BOTTOMS is about a lot of things. It's about death and evil coming into children's lives, race relations in Depression-era Texas, justice and the law, and a killer who may or may not be a semi-mythical being. In fact, these themes are part of the problem; I don't think it's possible to read the first part of the book and not think of TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. And while there's nothing fundamentally wrong with THE BOTTOMS, it just simply isn't TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. (Quite honestly, I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone would deliberately court comparison with such a great bookit seems to me like asking for trouble.) As a mystery, THE BOTTOMS doesn't quite work either, because the solution is relatively transparent, and the slasher prose that I associate with Lansdale is strangely muted. I guess that leaves either a race-relations novel (not bad in that respect, but nothing earth-shattering) or a coming-of-age novel (ditto). When you come right down to it, there isn't enough folk wisdom to offset the weak mystery, and there isn't enough mystery to prop up the folk wisdom. | |
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