Author Spotlight: Joe R. Lansdale
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- February 28, 2015
Joe R. Lansdale. Yep, he’s the next author in the spotlight for our series focusing on contributors to A Darke Phantastique. He sets up his story:
We were at the club’s Christmas Eve party.
In the past, the organization had been all male, but though we had changed with the times, few women came to our meetings, perhaps finding them boring. But on Christmas Eve we always have parties, and even before the club moved with the times, women were invited to this specific shindig. The rules were simple: no presents, no children, just adults, drinking and eating and singing, and later, if anyone had a good Christmas story, they were allowed to tell it. Usually there was time for one good long story,
and that was it.
And what made Joe want to write a story like this?
The story was a chance to write an old-fashioned horror tale starring an investigator of the strange. A way to take a holiday from my usual tone and get back to the roots of the sort of horror I grew up on.
Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over forty novels and numerous short stories, short articles, plays, poems, screenplays, teleplays, and comic scripts. He has received the Edgar Award, nine Bram Stokers—including Lifetime Achievement— and many other honors for his writing. He is in the Texas Literary Hall of Fame and the Texas Institute of Letters, and is Writer in Residence at Stephen F. Austin State University. Film adaptations of his novels Cold in July (directed by Jim Mickle and starring Michael C. Hall, Don Johnson, and Sam Shepard) and The Bottoms (to be directed by Bill Paxton) are slated to be released in 2014 and 2015, respectively. In fiction, his collection Bleeding Shadows is currently available, and his Jonah Hex comic book work have all been recently collected by DC Comics.
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