Joe Lansdale is best known for his series of violently farcical novels in which Hap Collins, white and straight, and Leonard Pine, black and gay, join forces in an odd crime team let loose among the rednecks of the Deep South, but The Bottoms is something very different. Deftly combining a murder mystery with an elegiac coming-of-age story, the book is set in east Texas in the mid-1930s when its narrator, Harry Crane, is on the verge of his teenage years. Harry is brutally exposed to the realities of the adult world when he discovers a mutilated body, bound with barbed wire to a tree in the river bottoms near his home. While his father, the local constable, searches for the killer and racial tensions explode in further violence, Harry and his younger sister, Thomasina (Tom), speculate that the killer is the Goat Man, a bogeyman of local legend who is said to haunt the woods and riverbanks of the neighborhood. Harry and Tom believe that they have seen the Goat Man and their curiosity about the supposed monster leads them both into dangers that they cannot fully understand.

Unlike the over-the-top, pulp adventures of Hap Collins and Leonard Pine, The Bottoms is a novel that quietly but relentlessly builds up suspense and tension as readers begin to realize that Harry and Tom face threats far worse than any posed by the supposed Goat Man. People in the real world are far more scary than any bogeyman of their childish imaginings. The years of the Great Depression and its effects on the lives of the Cranes are beautifully evoked in a restrained prose that owes little to Lansdale's earlier, more rumbustious writing and the story develops into a remarkably powerful portrait of a small, rural community descending into fear and paranoia.

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