Old Venus

JOE R. LANSDALE

Prolific Texas writer Joe R. Lansdale has won the Edgar Award, the British Fantasy Award, the American Horror Award, the American Mystery Award, the International Crime Writers’ Award, and six Bram Stoker Awards. Although perhaps best known for horror/thrillers such as The Nightrunners, Bubba Ho-Tep, The Bottoms, The God of the Razor, and The Drive-In, he also writes the popular Hap Collins and Leonard Pine mystery series—Savage Season, Mucho Mojo, The Two-Bear Mambo, Bad Chili, Rumble Tumble, Captains Outrageous, Devil Red, and Hyenas—as well as Western novels such as Texas Night Riders and Blood Dance, and totally unclassifiable cross-genre novels such as Zeppelins West, The Magic Wagon, and Flaming London. His other novels include Dead in the West, The Big Blow, Sunset and Sawdust, Act of Love, Freezer Burn, Waltz of Shadows, The Drive-In 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels, Leather Maiden, Deranged by Choice, and Edge of Dark Water. He has also contributed novels to series such as Batman and Tarzan. His many short stories have been collected in By Bizarre Hands, Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back, The Shadows, Kith and Kin, The Long Ones, Stories by Mama Lansdale’s Youngest Boy, Bestsellers Guaranteed, On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks, Electric Gumbo, Writer of the Purple Rage, Fist Full of Stories, Steppin’ Out, Summer ’68, Bumper Crop, The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent, Selected Stories by Joe R. Lansdale, For a Few Stories More, Mad Dog Summer and Other Stories, The King and Other Stories, Deadman’s Road, an omnibus, Flaming Zeppelins: The Adventures of Ned the Seal, Shadows West (with John L. Lansdale), Trapped in the Saturday Matinee, and High Cotton: the Collected Stories of Joe R. Lansdale. As editor, he has produced the anthologies The Best of the West, Retro Pulp Tales, Son of Retro Pulp Tales, Razored Saddles (with Pat LoBrutto), Dark at Heart: All New Tales of Dark Suspense (with wife Karen Lansdale), The Horror Hall of Fame: The Stoker Winners, the Robert E. Howard tribute anthology, Cross Plains Universe (with Scott A. Cupp), Crucified Dreams, and The Urban Fantasy Anthology (edited with Peter S. Beagle). An anthology in tribute to Lansdale’s work is Lords of the Razor. His most recent books are a new Hap and Leonard novel, Dead Aim; The Thicket; The Ape Man’s Brother; and a big retrospective collection, Bleeding Shadows. He lives with his family in Nacogdoches, Texas.

Here he sweeps us along with a man who is wrenched out of his proper place and time and thrown headlong into another world, one that proves even more dangerous than going down with the sinking Titantic …