Review: 'Leather Maiden,' by Joe R. Lansdale
BOOK REVIEW
A journalist battling addictions has his family loyalty tested by a murder he's investigating.
IF 10 excellent authors wrote the same book, the same story, in their own way, nobody would like all of them even though the subject was the same. Why is that? Why can a tale be told and retold, and some versions resonate for us while others don't?
It has to do with the teller, not the tale.
To enjoy a novel, the author's voice has to touch readers and wake up something inside them that will spark a vision, a smell or a memory. Sometimes these cortical flashes are uncomfortable, touching nerves and displaying small animated remembrances of bad times gone by. They can make us edgy and nervous, and are the meat and potatoes of a great suspense story. Like a roller coaster at an amusement park, we love the ride even as it scares the living daylights out of us. We'll even ride it again the first chance we get.
Sometimes, as in the case of a book by Joe R. Lansdale, those flashes are comfort food: They wrap us up and take us back to a sepia-toned time to which we can relate. Lansdale's "The Bottoms" does that. Though filled with evil ideas and vile people, that book is a greatly underappreciated novel, and I'd find it a place on my bookshelf between "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter."
Lansdale's new novel, "Leather Maiden," is lightweight in comparison to his earlier work, an airplane novel just right for reading during those new, expanded-time flights from coast to coast. That isn't a criticism, however: In this novel, Lansdale has created a landscape of broken dreams, skewed personalities and hope still clinging to the inside of the Pandora's box of problems they all share.
The narrator is Cason Statler, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated failure who is trying to claw his way back to the surface after a bout of alcoholism and the loss of the love of his life. He is battling his addictions and is a bit of a stalker too. What he hasn't lost is his keen observation of life and his nose for a good news story.
Cason and the folks of his East Texas hometown, Camp Rapture, are colorful, a bit outlandish and yet very real. Cason, who has come home to figure out what happened to his life, is a wiseguy, as so many Lansdale narrators are, but his attitude never feels forced. It comes naturally in much the same way as the wisecracks and observations of Steve Niles' detective Cal McDonald in his "Criminal Macabre" stories: They're just a way of dealing with the daily underbelly of life. Where Niles paints his stories with a supernatural-dipped brush and a broad stroke of humor, however, Lansdale takes real life and forces us to look at it through the absurdity of what living is all about. His humor comes out of that reality.
