The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent collects 34 stories, 16 never before published, by Joe R. Lansdale, award-winning author of The Two-Bear Mambo, and Bad Chili. Ultimately, with a writer like Joe R. Lansdale, it's his voice that carries us along from one project to the next. It's his voice that brings us back time and time again. The writer behind that voice, the guy on the other side of that page. The early stories included in this book give us a whisper of that voice. Watch for it. Listen closely. Joe's voice might crack a little bit as our boy shuffles through a kind of writer's puberty, but that's just part of the fun. Which is another way of saying that you shouldn't take any of these tales too seriously. You'll see Joe trying on different hats, jumping from genre to genre, sometimes in one story. If you're looking for primo Lansdale, you've come to the wrong place. But without these stories, there wouldn't have been any primo Lansdale. Keep that in mind as you settle in for a lazy afternoon with that damn near twenty-year overnight success, Joe R. Lansdale. Hisownself. —Norman Partridge, from the introduction
Author
Champion Mojo Storyteller Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over forty novels and numerous short stories. His work has appeared in national anthologies, magazines, and collections, as well as numerous foreign publications. He has written for comics, television, film, newspapers, and Internet sites. His work has been collected in more than two dozen short-story collections, and he has edited or co-edited over a dozen anthologies. He has received the Edgar Award, eight Bram Stoker Awards, the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Grinzani Cavour Prize for Literature, the Herodotus Historical Fiction Award, the Inkpot Award for Contributions to Science Fiction and Fantasy, and many others. His novella Bubba Ho-Tep was adapted to film by Don Coscarelli, starring Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis. His story "Incident On and Off a Mountain Road" was adapted to film for Showtime's "Masters of Horror," and he adapted his short story "Christmas with the Dead" to film hisownself. The film adaptation of his novel Cold in July was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and the Sundance Channel has adapted his Hap & Leonard novels for television. He is currently co-producing several films, among them The Bottoms, based on his Edgar Award-winning novel, with Bill Paxton and Brad Wyman, and The Drive-In, with Greg Nicotero. He is Writer In Residence at Stephen F. Austin State University, and is the founder of the martial arts system Shen Chuan: Martial Science and its affiliate, Shen Chuan Family System. He is a member of both the United States and International Martial Arts Halls of Fame. He lives in Nacogdoches, Texas with his wife, dog, and two cats.
