High Cotton: Selected Stories of Joe R. Lansdale

This collection of Joe R. Lansdale stories represents the best of the “Lansdale” genre—a strange mixture of dark crime, even darker humor, and adventure tales. The stories are varied in setting and theme, but they are all pure Lansdale—eerie, amusing, and occasionally horrific.

In “The Pit,” modern gladiators square off against one another using Roman methods. An alternate-history tale called “Trains Not Taken” shows Buffalo Bill as an ambassador and Wild Bill Hickok as a clerk. Lansdale’s love of large lizards and humor are evident in the stories “Godzilla’s Twelve Step Program” and “Bob the Dinosaur Goes to Disneyland.”

The pit
Not from Detroit
Booty and the beast
Steppin’ out, summer, ’68
Incident on and off a mountain road
My dead dog, Bobby
Trains not taken
Tight little stitches in a dead man’s back
Dog, cat, and baby
Mister weed-eater
By bizarre hands
The fat man and the elephant
The phone woman
Letter from the South, two moons west of Nacogdoches
By the hair of the head
The job
Godzilla’s twelve step program
Drive-in date
Bob the dinosaur goes to Disneyland
The steel Valentine
Night they missed the horror show