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.---
Reviewed by Jennifer Wendel