Like his friend and colleague Dean R. Koontz, native Texan Joe R. Lansdale possesses an enormous and varied talent that can't be locked into a single genre. Having built his carrer so far on such strange and violent novels as Act of Love, The Nightrunners, and Cold in July, it's obvious that Lansdale is a master of psychological horror, even if he hates being labeled as such. With such weird novels like The Drive-In and The Drive-In 2, Lansdale also shows a penchant second to none for the utterly outrageous. His western horror novel Dead in the West combines zombies and cowpokes into a George Romero/Sergio Leone masterpiece, while sentimental gem The Magic Wagon is poignant enough to bring tears to anyone who reads it.

If his novels weren't enough, his short stories (over 100 to date) would certainly qualify this plaintalkin' writer for cult status. Just three stories like "Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back" ( Year's Best Horror Stories XVI), the award winning "Night They Missed The Horror Show" (Silver Scream), and "On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert with Dead Folks" ( Book of the Dead), are enough to declare that Lansdale has arrived. (A collection entitled By Bizarre Hands has just been issued from specialty publisher Mark Ziesing)

Like Koontz, King, and Barker, Joe R. Lansdale is going to be a "brand name" author in the near future, cutting a swath of bloody and weird tales which are uniquely his own.

Fangoria: There was a time when you were grouped in with the young lads half-seriously referred to as splatterpunks. It was a title you didn't seem overly thrilled with.

Joe R. Lansdale: I didn't like to be called a splatterpunk writer at all. I was doing what I do long before anyone decided to call anything "splatterpunk." I don't think it's a fair term, anyway, in the sense that I do a wide variety of things. I don't mean to imply that I dislike splatterpunk or the people who write it; I don't like the title merely because I find it limiting. If people start thinking of you in that way, then they always expect you to write that sort of fiction. I don't like any kind of lable at all.

I don't even think of myself as a horror writer. And I don't mean that in the way those film directors say, "Oh no, this isn't a horror film." I. by God, like horror. And I write horror. But I write other things, too. It's no more fair to call me a horror writer than a Western writer of a suspense writer, because I'm those, too. I'm a writer. So it doesn't bother me at all to be called a horror writer; the only thing I'm saying is I don't want to be referred to as "just" a horror writer because I don't want to mislead people into expecting that all the time. It is the largest percentage of my work, and a lot of the novels and short stories I've written, which may not be thought of strictly as horror, always have horrific details. In my suspense work it's the same way.

Fang:You may not use the term horror, but there's a great deal of intense violence in your work, and for many critics, violence can be equated with contemporary definitions of horror.

Lansdale:That's true. Many stories I've written have no violence or your usual "action" in them, but I do lean in that direction. I'm fascinated by violence-I'll be the first one to say so-but my fascination with it doesn't necessarily mean I enjoy violence or that I'm a violent person anymore than anyone else. I suppose that all people who are involved with horror, action/adventure, suspense or crime fiction are in some way connected with that interest in violence. that's what sells newspapers and television programs. So most of us who are at least willing to admit it are in one way or another interested in violense, even if our interest is in being incredibly repulsed by the whole idea of violence.

Fang:But few writers seem to deal with violence so intensely; you almost gleefully rub the reader's nose in the sight and smell of it.

Lansdale: There is a certain glee in my work, I'll admit. But for me, it heightens the horror. It's really a little trick I learned from Robert Bloch. My approach and style are very different from Bloch's, but he is really the one who taught me and so many others that horror and humor are opposite sides of the sword. When I was growing up, Bloch was undoubtedly my favorite horror writer. He still is one of my favorites.

The hard-boiled mystery writers influenced me in terms of style and approach. In many ways, I consider Robert Bloch a hard-boiled writer, with Psycho and The Scarf. Those are masterpieces. The hard-boiled voice has influenced me alot more than horror. In the same way, Flannery O'Conner has been an enormouse influence. So I like that straightforward, "here it is, screw you" attitude. He was an original I-don't-know-what-you-would-call-it, but he would always cackle on about the most unpleasant things in the world [laughs]! And I always liked that posture, because if I was going to read horror, I wanted it to be scary. For me, he was scarier that way. And when he wasn't scary, he was at least always interesting and entertaining.

There's nothing more frightening than to find horrible things somewhat amusing. Any horror movie or book, even a good one-if you stop and think about the majority of 'em, the ideas are stupid, unless you really believe in vampires and witches and werewolves. Of course, horror has moved in considerable different directions from that, which I believe it has to. We've outgrown it for the most part.

Which is not to say people shouldn't write about these supernatural creatures. I'm not saying I wouldn't do it. But in modern times, they become more representative of modern themes, rather than simply being vampires and witches and werewolves. They may have had some psychological representation, but they have even more now, if they're used effectively. They represent today's society.

Fang:That's why the traditional horror label doesn't quite fit you. Your work is more concerned with the terror man encounters in fighting his inner demons, rather than any supernatural forces from beyond.

Lansdale: Yes, I really am. I find as time goes on, I'm more and more bored with supernatural elements. a large percentage of my work doesn't contain them at all. I hadn't thought about it before, but it's almost Lovecraftian in that I often deal with the breakdown of what you think are the expected rules of existence. In a sense, I guess that's what H.P. Lovecraft was doing with his Cthulhu mythos, except he had them explained as aliens or entities.

Fang:The Magic Wagon is unique among your works to date; it's all but impossible to shoehorn into any one genre. What compelled you to write it?

Lansdale: I feel a strong connection to that one because it's very much about East Texas, and it takes place the year my father was born. My father's voice is what I tried to capture, with my own voice mixed in. By that, it contains some of the stories and attitudes he told me when I was growing up. And I added in my own tendencies toward fantasy and oddball elements. but I am also a great fan of Westerns. I wished I had written more Westers, but fate just didn't work out that way. I have a great big Western novel that I would like to do at some point.

What I've begun to realize, and I could be wrong on this, is that one of the things that makes my horror work interesting is that I do come at it from the perspective of thinking of myself as a Western or suspense author writing horror, so the blend comes out more interesting for me. If you analyze my stories, you'll see thay are very western-oriented or have western elements.

Fang: The Drive-In and it's sequal The Drive-In 2 are again two novels which seem to fit into no set category, but rather use elements os every fantasy-related genre one can imagine, plus some elements no sane person shoud imagine.

Lansdale:I usually enjoy every line when I'm writing, but I didn't enjoy writing "Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back" or either of the Drive-In books. And They're the ones that seem the lightest and frothiest, in many ways. I had a very, very hard time writing them. The universe I set them in was confining. Also, I work better when dealing with normal situations that are screwed up, instead of abnormal situations that get screwed up even more! In a universe where anything can happen, you have to rely very strongly on humor and on characters, and that just takes a lot out of you. Writing those two books was very much like being a stand-up comic. You're on stage people, paid their money, and by God, you'd better be funny-'cause they've got tomatoes.

Fang: Stephen King once outlined three levels of fictional horror, the third and most outrageous being "to go for the gross-out." Some of your critics would state this is the level where Joe Lansdale's typically begins.

Lansdale: [Laughs]I like to go for the gross-out if it has some irony. I'll probably put my foot in my mouth for saying so-and then they'll say, "That pretentious jackass!"-but I think of myself as a satirist a lot of times. Not every time out, but I often see what I do as being that way because some stuff is so over the top that it is humor. Like "Cadillac Desert..." A number of people, I'm told, were deeply offended, which in one sense makes me feel real good. and in another sense, I'm not out just to write something that will offens. It's very easy to offend, but it's not easy to offend deeply [laughs].

Fang:Organized religion seems to be one of your favorite targets as a satirist, again most obviously in The Drive-In and it's sequel.

Lansdale: I seem to have this thing about religion. I step on it every chance I get. It's not that I'm stepping on people's beliefs in that sense of religion. I'm stepping on the smugness that people have about religion, about how everybody's got to believe in this or that to be a good person. I think if I'm a good person and lead a good life, I don't have to go to church ot necessarily believe in a Christian God, ar any God, for that matter. I can believe that I live this life, I die, I go belly-up, I'm meat for the worms. And if I can be a good person knowing that, that accomplishment may be greater than expecting some reward in the next life.

Fang:Are ther any boundaries you set on yourself as a writer? You don't appear to be the sort who "precensors" his work to insure easy acceptance from an editor or publisher.

Lansdale: No, I don't think so, either. Much to the dissatisfaction of many publishers, and to the audience, too, at some point. I'm sure I have some subconscious boundaries, like everbode else. My boundaries would be that I will write about almost anything, except in an area where I feel It's already been overworked. Or on a particular subject I can't give anything new to. My boundaries are: Avoid stupidity, and don't try to repeat what someone else has done because you like what they did. Those are the only real boundaries I have in mind.

Fang:Do you ever use any of your personal fears or experiences in your stories?

Lansdale:I use a tremendous amount of autobiographical material, and use alot of my own fears. I use the fears of other people that they've told me. Usually, if I can't put something of myself into the stories, I can't write them. Which is not the same thing as saying the stories represent all my beliefs, but they are boiled down from my subconscious. Mainly, it's autobiographical elemants from personal attitudes and beliefs or experiences. A lot comes from newspaper headlines.

Fang:It's well known that you had some trouble early in your career with publishers being afraid to deal with such violently explicit novels as Act of Love and The Nightrunners. Is this still the case?

Lansdale:You know, it's funny, but when I started out, I sure did have trouble. Now publishers always expect for me to be over the top, and don't even think about it anymore. Maybe they should [laughs]. No, I hope it doesn't get to that again. Ive had editors say, "I like the story, but I just can't...because I'm afraid it'll ruin my magazine." I had one hard-boiled tale called "Boys Will Be Boys" which caused subscriptions to be cancelled.

Fang: Speaking of the rocky road to success, what advice do you have for anyone who imagines writing an easy path to fame and fortune?

Lansdale:Learn to be a plumber. I'm serious. You need to learn something where you can make money, set your own hours and then spend your spare time writing as you see fit. A plumber makes pretty good wages, doesn't have to work all the time and doesn't have to take a specific job if he doesn't want to. I was a janitor, and found that was good for me. The rest of the advice is put your ass in a chair, put some paper in a typewriter and write.

Fang:You've edited a few fairly strange Western anthologies. Like your own work, they are a wild collage of Western elements, science fiction, horror, fantasy, mystery-you name it. What was the inspiration behind them?

Lansdale:In many ways, they were attempts to interest people in the cross-pollination of genres. Best of the West has perhaps more traditional Western material that the others. My love of Westerns is there, but I didn't hold anybody to any strict guidelines and cliches: "Just take some idea of the Western in your mind and take it from there." It's the whole idea of blending genres and becoming a little less genre-conscious, which is not a comment that I don't like horror or Westerns or science fiction-I like all of them-but one of the things that is wrong with all those fields is that they become predictable. They become what's expected. That's the main reason I did the anthologies, and each one's a little bit different from the others. The New Frontier is the one I'm most proud of.

Fang:Any nibbles from Hollywood for your work?

Lansdale:Dead in the West has been optiones. The book itself was optioned, I've done a screenplay, and we'll see what happens to it. I've had a tremendous amount of film interest in all of my work. I haven't written a novel yet that there hasn't been film interest in. So we'll see what all pans out. I like the idea of writing original screenplays, and might even adapt a book someone else wrote. But I don't feel driven like, "My God, I've got to work in the movies!" I want to do it, but I believe I can pick and choose the projects I want to work on. A few years ago, things might have been different. I night have needed the money and said, "Sure, I want to write the next sequel to Piranha XII."

Fang:It was once said about Charles Beaumont that he was the type of writer who wouldn't be remembered for the titles of his books, but for his name being on the books. It would seem to hold true as well for Joe Lansdale.

Lansdale:I generally just think, "This is the story I'm telling now. I will tell it to the best of my ability." I don't worry if I'm topping the last story or not. I don't worry if my audience is going to accept it or not. I don't think about my audience, and that's not an insult to the readers, I certainly care about the readers. but when I sit down behind the rypewriter, to heck with the readers!

What I'm interested in, then, is me and a writer, or otherwise I cannot get the this story down. If I start worrying about my readership, then I'm going to repeat myself and burn out either myself or my readers. Or I'm going to bore myself. In that case, why not dig an ditch?

I'm just not going to open new gates if I say, "I've found what works!" I don't think I've ever found what works. There's a certain coice that comes throught most of my stories, but I'm sort of like a weathervane-there's no telling where I'll point next time. I want to keep it that way, because in the long run I'll get more readers, and the readers respect that more. I don't ever want to be a predictable commodity.