Joe R. Lansdale: The Bottoms (USA 2010)

From the Publisher:
A thriller with echoes of William Faulkner and Harper Lee, The Bottoms is classic American storytelling in its truest, darkest, and more affecting form.

Its 1933 in East Texas and the Depression lingers in the air like a slow moving storm. When a young Harry Collins and his little sister stumble across the body of a black woman who has been savagely mutilated and left to die in the bottoms of the Sabine River, their small town is instantly charged with tension. When a second body turns up, this time of a white woman, there is little Harry can do from stopping his Klan neighbors from lynching an innocent black man. Together with his younger sister, Harry sets out to discover who the real killer is, and to do so they will search for a truth that resides far deeper than any river or skin color.

Joe R. Lansdale: The Bottoms. A Novel. Vintage Books, ISBN: 0307475263 (December, 2010), 328 p., $15.95, eBook $11.99.

Joe R. Lansdale: The Bottoms (USA 2001)

From the Publisher:
When young Harry Crane stumbles upon a mutilated body in the local river bottoms, the region beomes trapped in a nightmare of fear and racial tension, as a vicious serial killer stalks the town, a man is lynched, and local law enforcement races against time to find the murderer, in a suspenseful tale set in Depression-era East Texas

Joe R. Lansdale: The Bottoms. A Novel. Mysterious Press, ISBN: 0446677922 (September, 2001), 328 p., $13.95.

Joe R. Lansdale: The Bottoms (UK 2001)

From the Publisher:
The Great Depression, East Texas. The woods are thick, the rivers wild, the weather ripe with tornadoes, and the Crane family, like most families in that neck of the woods, are eking out a thin living. When young Harry Crane discovers a mutilated body bound to a tree with barbed wire in the river bottoms, the underbelly of East Texas is exposed. Whites fear a renegade Negro. Blacks fear a vengeful massacre, or, if the killer is white, that the law will let him slip through its fingers. Harry believes the murderer is the Goat Man, an East Texas monster of legend who lurks beneath the swing bridge on the Sabine River, like the Billy Goat Gruff. Harry and his sister have actually seen the Goat Man, or something much like him, in his nocturnal haunts. As the bodies mount up, an elderly black man is lynched, both blacks and whites are terrorised, and Harry's father - the local law - and grandmother investigate, searching for a killer who may be a lot closer than they think.

Joe R. Lansdale: The Bottoms. Phoenix, ISBN: 0753814366 (July, 2001), 307 p., £6.99.

Joe R. Lansdale: The Bottoms (UK 2000)

From the Publisher:
The Bottoms has all of Lansdale's customary vivid style and speedy pace but leaves behind the wisecracking Hap/Leonard duo for something much darker and more considered.

It's the 1930's Great Depression in East Texas. Life is hard, racism is rife and someone has been mutilating and killing black women. The assumption is that blacks are killing blacks, so no lawman has bothered to put the killings together and discern a pattern. Jacob - part-time farmer, barber and constable - has a common-sense view on race that brings him into conflict with the local Ku Klux Klan. He makes it his business to find out what's going on and so brings down the full panoply of deep-south racism on his family cross-burnings and all.

Joe R. Lansdale: The Bottoms. Gollancz, ISBN: 0575068396 (November, 2000), 307 p., £16.99.

Joe R. Lansdale: The Bottoms (USA 2000)

From the Publisher:
The talented voice of East Texas delivers a riveting, poignant, and suspenseful tale of a Depression-era serial murder seen through the eyes of a young boy.

Today, the Sabine River runs as before, yet the bottoms have been drained. Long gone are the alligators, and the few birds that take to the air cast tiny shadows over concrete surfaces.

But way back then, during the thick of the Great Depression that squeezed Deep East Texas in its impoverishing grip, a boy could hear the crickets and the frogs in the star-studded southern night. And in this primordial time a killer stalked the land.

When young Harry Crane discovers the black woman's body, mutilated and bound to a tree with barbed wire, he unwittingly unleashes a storm of uncontrolled fear, thinly buried racial animosities, and fearsomely escalating violence. Jacob Crane, Harry's father and the town constable, struggles valiantly to see that proper justice gets done.

Joe R. Lansdale: The Bottoms. Mysterious Press, ISBN: 0892967048 (September, 2000), 328 p., $24.95.