I finally got a copy of Joe Lansdale's story "Bubba Ho-Tep". I was knocked out by the movie, which I reviewed in an earlier post. Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis are dynamite as the "King of Rock 'n Roll" and the "King of Camelot" taking on an ancient soul-sucking Egyptian mummy. It's a pure blast, and a surprisingly moving and potent character study of what it can mean to reclaim one's dignity.
The original story is no less impressive. I found in The Best of Joe Lansdale. It's an unabashedly crude tale which doesn't for a moment demure from speaking of the many aspects of human existence which demand our daily attention. The human animal is presented at his most basic, a creature subject to the demands of nature, but who can with will rise above the limits of the body and the expectations of society to achieve heroic things, things that need doing.
It's a wonderfully frank story of two crazy old men who find they and they alone can save their peers from a danger too strange and peculiar to even be noticed by the powers that be. Two old men, perhaps heroes of our age, perhaps two cracked-up old farts, or possibly both, work together because neither is enough unto himself to defeat an ancient evil that savages the very identity of what it means to be a man.
Joe Lansdale has found the perfect essence of great horror, placing the threat just at the edge of civilized knowledge in a remote corner where we don't think to look. Horror is with us always, but we avert our eyes or are too stupid to take note. It preys upon us because we don't want to know. In this story two men see and strike back. They fight for us all.
Congratulations Mr.Lansdale on a truly magnificent tale.
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