A thriller with echoes of William Faulkner and Harper Lee, The Bottoms is classic American storytelling in its truest, darkest, and more affecting form.
Its 1933 in East Texas and the Depression lingers in the air like a slow moving storm. When a young Harry Collins and his little sister stumble across the body of a black woman who has been savagely mutilated and left to die in the bottoms of the Sabine River, their small town is instantly charged with tension. When a second body turns up, this time of a white woman, there is little Harry can do from stopping his Klan neighbours from lynching an innocent black man. Together with his younger sister, Harry sets out to discover who the real killer is, and to do so they will search for a truth that resides far deeper than any river or skin color.
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[News didn't travel the way it does now]***
(Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 7 December 2010, first published 2000, 328 pages, paperback, #popsugarreadingchallenge 2020, a bildungsroman, borrowed from @GlasgowLib)
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The Bottoms has a lot in common with To Kill a Mockingbird. It's strange that I loved it so much as I really disliked Harper Lee book considered a masterpiece. Lansdale's book though, hooked me, made me fall in love and tore a hole straight through me. Both books dealt with similar themes but in a different way. Anyway, I digress. The Bottoms is dark, gritty, unsettling and impossible to put down. There's a sense of complete hopelessness throughout the novel. Women are being killed. Clearly innocent men are being lynched because people are afraid and lashing out. There's inevitable tragedy in the air. Harry is a great character and I loved seeing events unfold through his eyes as he realises just how dark things are getting and how fast. This is bleak and beautiful.
