Country: USA
Genre: Hardboiled/Crime
Pages: 178
Order SAVAGE SEASON Here
Other Joe R. Lansdale Books Reviewed:
The Bottoms (2000)
Bullets and Fire (2011)
The army tried to give me outs. I give them that. One officer even suggested I make a break for Canada. The war had soured even his way of thinking, and he was a lifer.
But I refused to run.
It was suggested I sign as a conscientious objector, but again I refused. C.O Status meant you though fighting for anything, even your life, was wrong. I didn't believe that Had I been around during the fighting of World War I or II, I would have gone and done my bit. The causes were just and the wars were fought with a conclusion in mind. I was an idealist, not a coward.
The greatest books are the most difficult to review. It's even difficult to explain why they're difficult to review, because their transcendence is such, they make you forget about your duty of analysis. They are so stacked with layers of ideas, plotlines, subplots and gorgeous characters, all perfectly intertwined, your sense of self goes out the window. Literature does its job so well, you exist within the confines of another world as you're reading. Joe R. Lansdale's SAVAGE SEASON was one of these novels for me. A perfect storm of hardboiled bravado, emotionally damaged characters and by-the-book tight plotting. Lansdale blew my mind earlier this year with his short story BULLETS AND FIRE and SAVAGE SEASON did exactly that, except that the story is six times longer. It's a short, lean and mean novel, yet it feels as satisfying as reading its best three hundred pages counterpart. I don't know of anyone who have read Joe R. Lansdale and didn't like it. Well, count me in as another rabid fan. Joe R. Lansdale is the man and SAVAGE SEASON is one of the best novels I've read this year.
It's the first novel of his famed Hap & Leonard series. The concept is simple, yet efficient (and way before its time). Hap Collins is a white, aging, ex-hippie and Leonard Pine is a black, homosexual Viet-Nam veteran. They are complete opposite and yet they are best friends. In SAVAGE SEASON, Hap's past comes biting back at him when his old flame Trudy walks back into his life. She had a bad habit of breaking Hap's heart and run away, so she's no favorite of Leonard. This time, she comes up with a job offer. Her current lover Howard, met a man in prison who told him about money from a bank heist that was never recovered. Trudy promises Hap two hundred grand to help them recover the money. Hap has one condition, they have to bring Leonard in, with whom he's going to share his part. But when an aging, cynical ex-hippie and his ex-military friend meet a bunch of people still hung up on the sixties, things are not likely to go well.
Where to start? With the characters, maybe? After all, they are the cornerstone of this novel. It focuses on Hap, more than Leonard, because he's the main character and Lansdale really exposes who he once was, versus who he has become and he does that in the smartest possible way. He is confronted to people who were once idealistic like he was and through more than a decade of hardships, he's able to draw some perspective on them and at the same time, on him. Through the character of Trudy (who, by the way, is a tremendous and realistic rendition of a poisonous vixen), Lansdale also exposes the dark truths that lie beyond the veil of idealism. The projection, the inability to go on and comforting nature of believing in beautiful things. I won't spoil it, but there is a chapter, short chapter, maybe four or five pages, where Trudy tells a certain story, that is as dark, intense and as good as any fiction I've ever read/seen/experienced and it's almost established through dialogue alone.
We went inside. Paco was sitting on one of the fold-out chairs grinning his false teeth. Trudy was sitting on the couch. She had her legs and arms crossed She looked as if she could crack walnuts with her asshole.
An unjustified strain of guilt went through me. I felt like a husband whose wife had just found rubbers in his wallet.
If those moments of great depth between Hap and Trudy were SAVAGE SEASON's only calling card, I'd hardly call it masterful, but it's the peak of the mountain. Everything's great. The characters all work together to great an intoxicating alchemy. Leonard cannot stand the aging hippies and gets into verbal confrontation often. Fragile crew member Chub exasperates everybody with his psychoanalysis talk. The mysterious Paco seems to clash with the rest of his team. All characters have their importance and help moving the plot forward. There are some chapters harder to read in SAVAGE SEASON, coarser, but they work alongside the storyline. Trudy's plan is a bad one and the punishing weather (hence the title) makes everything so much more difficult for everybody. The process of retrieving the money is slow and painful and yet, the way it wears on the characters is also necessary to the novel's progression. It's a very dynamic and rewarding approach to storytelling.
Reading novels like SAVAGE SEASON makes you think of yourself as a reader. Why did I like it so much? What made it so great? It had all the elements to please me. Great characters. An impressive emotional range that goes from humor to borderline psychosis. A dynamic plots that offers its reader both challenge and reward and on top of that, a genuine intellectual stance on something, in this case, the decline of noble idea, alongside with noble people in an increasingly more cynical society. Is SAVAGE SEASON perfect? Maybe, maybe not. Depends on your stomach for literary mayhem. Is Joe R. Lansdale a master at what he does? Absolutely. He could write whatever he wants and yet he chooses to write his own particular blend of crime fiction. After finishing SAVAGE SEASON, I can be comfortable saying that alongside Dennis Lehane, Joe R. Lansdale is the best living crime writer today. Yes, I went there. He is that good.
FIVE STARS