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Rating: Four guys go to the Orbit: the largest Drive-In in Texas, maybe in the world, for a Friday night filled with horror movies with cheap special effects, snacks, carbonated drinks and not shying away, if opportunity knocks, from a bit of casual sex at the window. 4000 people had similar thoughts, contributing to the gigantic spirals outside the immense parking lot equipped with six giant screens that blended into the crimson sky of a summer sunset. Some of them were even getting pissed off for the wasted time, unaware that it would be their grave! The higher powers, as if jokingly or out of boredom, had decided to turn the unlucky popcorn munchers' lives into the worst B-movie ever conceived, which begins with the arrival of a comet that screws up the sky.
If you know Joe R. Lansdale, it's likely you've flipped through some of the adventures of the amusing detective duo Hap Collins & Leonard Pine. The narrative style is the same; temporally, it is close to “Mucho Mojo,” but the content is infinitely more extreme, irreverent and, I won't deny it, heavy; so much so that I recommend diving into the reading possibly on an empty stomach. Few sarcastic jokes, or simply their impact on the reader is dampened by an apocalyptic environment, made of cannibalism and the animalistic law of the fittest in the fight for survival. The detachment from reality is sudden for an ostensibly absurd work seeming made for a straitjacket that prominently features, among others, a "king" who feeds his subjects by vomiting, yes, vomiting, popcorn. Vomitocorn.
In the second part, we will leave Orbit only to return at the end and meet a disturbing character, (a murderer on the run before the comet's passage), a tragic-comic one who has a TV instead of a head. But in a context where dinosaurs walk, forests filled with sharp film strips, and roads that change course becoming loops, in such a context, I was saying, a guy with a TV for a face is not too surprising. I know, it seems like I've thrown a handful of words from a dictionary onto the screen, but that's it.
Another notable difference with the Hap & Leonard series novels lies in the fact that in all this apparent and gratuitous delirium, there is paradoxically much more substance and depth compared to the entertaining and masterful tales of the two badass DIY detectives. It's undeniable that the plots often serve merely as excellent excuses to write damn good noir stories set in the beloved East Texas, the author's homeland. In “The Drive-In Night,” on the other hand, Lansdale is, in my view, masterful in describing humanity's return to animal instinct, capable of sweeping century-old legislative regulations under the rug in a negligible amount of time. Rapes, cannibalism, a return to exchange, to violent barter, with sex as the only currency. The past vanishes as if someone had accidentally tugged too hard on a bathtub plug. The most sentimental and hopelessly attached to the "pre-comet" world find an escape, the only one, in suicide. Here, in the purest Darwinism, there's space only for those who adapt in the shortest time possible. The author maintains the element of hope until the end of the story, but the taste is the bittersweet one of obtuseness: a ridiculous thing, however understandable for irrational animals completely incapable of enjoying the present. And so, with immense sarcasm, the book ends with a brilliant “rode West and it all went well!”: one of those endings torn from a sappy Hollywood film and improperly stitched onto this story with phlegm and blood.
It's a work of murderous ferocity, ruthless cynicism. The protagonists progressively lose their humanity, harden like granite, realizing the inconsistency of a celestial plan and that life, especially theirs, is nothing but a merry-go-round ride. Some characters are more reluctant to admit it, but in the end, all will converge in the slash that Lansdale gives his readers by describing a hypothetical God as... “A sort of celestial Jack the Ripper, capable of promising us, his whores, rewards with one hand while with the other holding a sharp dagger to cut us better.” (quote)
Years later, the Texan writer also wrote a third part. I sincerely advise against it: it burdens everything, adding little and risking sinking a work that, in my opinion, didn’t need further strains and delusions.
These crooked lines are tepidly dedicated to the esteemed de-user Popcorn Shooter: if this is not a book suitable for Your nickname, I'll melt and be forced to review “Heart” and “Three Meters Above the Sky” with 5 stars.
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