Les Marécages

The narrator of _The Bottoms_ is Harry Collins, an old man obsessively

reflecting on certain key experiences of his childhood. In 1933, the year that

forms the centerpiece of the narrative, Harry is 11 years old and living with

his mother, father, and younger sister on a farm outside of Marvel Creek,

Texas, near the Sabine River bottoms. Harry's world changes forever when he

discovers the corpse of a young black woman tied to a tree in the forest near

his home. The woman, who is eventually identified as a local prostitute, has

been murdered, molested, and sexually mutilated. She is also, as Harry will

soon discover, the first in a series of similar corpses, all of them the

victims of a new, unprecedented sort of monster: a traveling serial killer.

From his privileged position as the son of constable (and farmer and part-time

barber) Jacob Collins, Harry watches as the distinctly amateur investigation

unfolds. As more bodies -- not all of them "colored" -- surface, the mood of

the local residents darkens. Racial tensions -- never far from the surface,

even in the best of times -- gradually kindle. When circumstantial evidence

implicates an ancient, innocent black man named Mose, the Ku Klux Klan

mobilizes, initiating a chilling, graphically described lynching that will

occupy a permanent place in Harry Collins's memories. With Mose dead and the

threat to local white women presumably put to rest, the residents of Marvel

Creek resume their normal lives, only to find that the actual killer remains

at large and continues to threaten the safety and stability of the town.

Lansdale uses this protracted murder investigation to open up a window on an

insular, poverty-stricken, racially divided community. With humor, precision,

and great narrative economy, he evokes the society of Marvel Creek in all its

alternating tawdriness and nobility, offering us a varied, absolutely

convincing portrait of a world that has receded into history. At the same

time, he offers us a richly detailed re-creation of the vibrant, dangerous

physical landscapes that were part of that world and have since been buried

under the concrete and cement of the industrialized juggernaut of the late

20th century. In Lansdale's hands, the gritty realities of Depression-era

Texas are as authentic -- and memorable -- as anything in recent American

fiction.