I haven’t come across anyone else that writes quite like Joe Lansdale. His prose can hit you like a fist in the face, but there's a tender heart behind it all. He’ll reach out and slap you, offend you, and wring a guilty chuckle out of you all at the same time. When you finish one of his novels, you’ll be blessed and have to beg forgiveness.
Leather Maiden allows Joe to evoke that small-town feeling that I love about his work. The novel deals in dark themes of murder, revenge, and base instinct, but one also finds redemption, honor, and integrity in the strangest of places. That juxtaposition is integral to Lansdale's worldview and writing style.
Cason Statler - a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist and Iraq War veteran - returns home after losing his job at a big paper in Houston for having affairs with his boss’s wife and stepdaughter and boozing it up. His parents welcome him home, but they expect him to be on better behavior.
Like many of Lansdale's other characters, Cason is smart and tough but he doesn’t always do the intelligent thing or even understand his own motivations. I like that about his characters, and Lansdale and I have had discussions before about this. We both know those people. We admire them and we pity them. At times, we’ve even been them.
I was drawn in by Cason's story and instantly felt like a long-lost friend. A scene in which he interviews with his future editor at the small-town newspaper had me laughing out loud. Now, Lansdale isn't always nice in his character descriptions - and definitely not politically correct - and this was one of those moments. My wife wondered how I could read a book like that, but I can't help it. These characters are real because I've met people just like them, and sometimes they make me laugh out loud when I know I shouldn't.
Back home, Cason struggles with finding his place in the world and getting over an old love who wrote him a Dear John letter while he was in Iraq. He’s not succeeding terribly well at either endeavor. Then, after miraculously landing the job at the paper while stinking of booze and with his shirt buttoned wrong, he latches onto the mystery of a young college student who went missing six months ago.
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