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An
elderly man sits in a nursing home, with plenty of time to remember
and relive his boyhood in an area of East Texas known as The Bottoms.
Even poorer and less developed than the rest of the country during
the Great Depression of the '30s, this marshy scrub woodland and
its people seem almost of another century. Harry Crane's father
is a man of some substance in the community. In addition to his
hardscrabble farm, he owns the local barbershop and is the town
constable. But Harry and his sister Tom live almost wild and unschooled.
When not needed on the farm or around the house, they roam freely
through the vast Bottoms. The area is infested with snakes, ticks,
chiggers, vicious wild boar, and even the occasional panther. Harry
and Tom also like to scare each other with stories of the Goatman,
a half-human monster rumored to steal livestock and children.
A real
horror comes to the children one day when they find the mutilated
body of a woman. Their father begins an official investigation,
which quickly is hindered by the fact that the woman was black.
The racial divide of this time and place is absolute and is enforced
viciously by the Klan. Even as a lawman, Harry's father finds it
risky to ask anything about a situation that might cut across racial
lines. He is forced to let it go and hope the killer was only a
transient who has left the area. The world of the Bottoms goes on
through the seasons, and the elderly Harry laments in memory how
now the place has been paved over in suburban sprawl. As rough,
poor and dangerous as it was, he deeply regrets that the land of
his youth is now gone forever.
Lansdale
creates many colorful and vivid characters to people the Bottoms.
He shows how the seemingly divided racial lines crisscross through
families and across generations. It soon becomes apparent that there
is indeed a serial killer haunting the Bottoms, but as long as his
victims are black, even decent people seem helpless. The roads are
unpaved mud washes, there is little organized quick communication,
and so gossip and fear are all that spread with any effectiveness.
It is hard for a child such as Harry to know when what he hears
is real or just the local propensity for "yarning."
THE
BOTTOMS tells a great yarn of a vanished place and time. The characters
often seem so alien to our world and yet they all are so human.
You can feel the children's terror and also experience the frustration
of good people trying to live with an evil system. One of the best
things a book can do is to capture and save a piece of the world
that has been lost. There may be strip malls now where the young
Harry Crane used to roam and grew up all too quickly, but Joe R.
Lansdale has preserved his world for us.
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Reviewed by Jennifer Wendel
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