This book is KILLING me!
I am dying here! Sunset and Sawdust by Joe R. Lansdale. I tried, I really really tried to read this book.

I am an open-minded chick with thick skin and a settled tummy. But this book
is just raunchy and humorless, wandering and twisted.

I am sure someone, somewhere might like it?

The cover says he's a hilarious writer, refreshing and a terrifically gifted storyteller. I think that must be why his editor let him fly with this trash? Who can tell him no when he's sold books?

It's more like potty humor from disturbed men than real humor. The wording is pretty sick, and everyone is sickening altogether. The jokes, if they can be called that are just disgusting anecdotes about bodily function and bodily dysfunction. Constant rape, violence, disrespect. None of the storytelling I expected and nothing is forgivable because the plot stinks. Actually, the plot COULD be good, but he doesn't pull it off.

Some scattered thoughts:

By page 20, there had been a unbelievable opening sequence of a storm that
just happens to blow her house apart as she's just killed her husband who
has fiercely beat her and was trying to rape her. That's not to say it was
unbelievably good, it was NOT believable.

After that, some odd twists when she told the family of the deceased. Next a
hobo on a train was almost raped by two men and he killed them. This is by
page 20. Think Deliverance here.

Then there was the body removal of the dead husband, also not believable.
They lay him on a board in their house - a sweltering heat, and don't put
him on ice until 48 hours or so postmortem.

The mother of the dead man who sewed her husband (who beats and rapes her)
into his bed, beating him with a rake and forcing him off at gunpoint. The
14 year old daughter who learns of her father's death and acts just as
bizarre.

I thought my head was going to explode by page 41. So I skipped ahead. To
the end, no less.

The protagonist who had killed her constable husband was made constable by
her mother -in -law. Her 14 year old had an abortion after being treated
poorly, not sure if she was raped too or what. More people had died.

The hobo had "been with" the protagonist and had messed up, and escaped from
jail. She's blamed for a murder. The murder victim she investigates is her
dead husband's girlfriend, whom the mother in law found dead in a pool of
oil. The MIL delivered the baby by cesarean, and then burried it. No one
knows in the end if the MIL killed her and the baby, or if the dead husband
did.

This was all done over a "few weeks" after getting away with her husband's
murder, that everyone knew about.


Oh brother.


- posted by Ginxy @ 4/29/2004 10:42:00 AM