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MOON LAKE
by Joe Lansdale
Mulholland Books, June 2021
352 pages
$28
ISBN: 031654064X


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Joe Lansdale is a writer of many talents. In addition to his popular Hap and Leonard series and the recent classically noir novel, MORE BETTER DEALS, he has written in the horror genre and penned stand-alone crime fiction that might fall under the category of Southern Gothic. MOON LAKE is solidly in that last tradition, though his setting, as usual, is very specifically East Texas, a part of the Lone Star State that is graced with spooky lakes, oddball eccentrics, and Jefferson Davis statues erected in an effort to rewrite history long after the south lost the civil war.

The lake itself is a reservoir that was formed by inundating the town of Long Lincoln in order to create a recreational attraction that never managed to attract tourists. New Long Lincoln was built just below the dam. As the novel opens, Danny is a boy whose mother has disappeared and who is on a dismal road trip with his destitute and despairing father. In his grief, he has decided to end it all by driving his car into the lake – taking Danny with him.

Against the odds, Danny is rescued by what he initially thinks is a mermaid, but turns out to be Ronnie, a Black girl whose family takes him in until his aunt can be tracked down. The time he spends with the Black family is full of warmth and kindness, as well as a romantic attraction to Ronnie, until his frigid aunt sends for him.

Ten years later, his aunt is dead and Danny has published his first novel. Working as a reporter for a failing newspaper, he learns that the car his father drove into the lake has been found--along with the skeleton of a woman hidden in the trunk. Though the police presume it's his mother, Danny isn't convinced. Ronnie, now a police officer in New Long Lincoln, helps him uncover the truth, which includes uncovering a ritualistic conspiracy, finding more bodies in car trunks, and a desperate chase through bootlegger tunnels that riddle this hill above the lake.

As readers have come to expect from Lansdale, MOON LAKE is often humorous, narrated in a tall-tale Texan drawl, exuberantly inventive, often creepy, and both fond and critical of East Texas, with its history of white supremacy and small-town corruption that, here, takes on echoes of the current popularity of bizarre "deep state" conspiracy theorizing. In Lansdale's hands, though, it's more of a shallow grave of small town greed, wrapped in bigotry among small-minded local power brokers who cling to old social hierarchies and try to keep the past hidden.

This eventful Gothic romp takes readers to some very strange places and, along the way, paints with a light touch a picture of the viciousness and veniality of people who won't let go of the myth of white superiority.

§ Barbara Fister is an academic librarian, columnist, and author of the Anni Koskinen mystery series.

Reviewed by Barbara Fister, April 2021

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