Publishing House: Fanucci
Author: Joe Lansdale
ISBN Code: 8834710827
Pages: 287
Price: 11.7 euros
1980s. We are in Texas - how could it be otherwise? - there is a Chevrolet Impala, black, year of manufacture 1966. Five very young stragglers in its lap. The metal shark snakes through the provincial streets, sows splinters of death, punctuating the hours between him and his prey. Clyde, the dead (dead?) gang leader, demands revenge. Becky, the prey, sinks. The rape she suffered a few months earlier has crumbled her relationship with a husband who may no longer be able to accept her. Becky sinks into vivid memories and confused, perhaps symbolic, visions. Becky has shut out reality. Some indecipherable bond was formed between her and Clyde, perhaps in the moment he hanged himself in prison. Or perhaps in the one in which he penetrated her by holding a knife to her throat.
And as the days march slowly and gloomily by in the cabin where Becky and her husband are spending the winter, the shark devours the asphalt, thirsty for blood and revenge.
"Lansdale has gone too far." That was the gist of the review that had set off my cranial spring and compelled me to buy, for the umpteenth time, the drive-in Texan. I was convinced that old Joe was at his best precisely in excess, in the unbridled release of his reveries. Having dismissed the reviewer as "weak in the stomach," I began to read. Page by page a constant took shape, later exploding in the final delirium: certain violence is needed. Initially stomach-churning, I almost branded the book fascist.
Yet something remained, it nicked my more liberal extremities, bringing to light urges that emerged at dramatic junctures and then concealed with shame. For a second I resurrected that rotter of the first Callaghan and dreamed of seeing him torture the bastard Una bomber to death. My rational demon called me an animal and brought me back to reality, but the phantom dark side had its nanosecond of glory.
Review by Editor
