At times, it strikes the reader surprising that the novel is set as recently as the Great Depression. The town is so 'backward' -- in its modes of life and its outlook, it feels as if it is even older. The Great Depression seems to have set East Texas back economically and culturally, at least in Harry's recollection. Harry's father's farm was doing a bit better than most neighboring farms, true, and Jacob Crane also owned the local barbershop where he hears much of the most choice town gossip -- ideal for someone involved in the enforcement of the law! But this affluence also made Jacob Crane's family prey to alienation and skepticism when Jacob wishes to do his duty. Also, Jacob's unmothered children frequently ran wild amongst a landscape of marsh, scrub, and the Texan woodland filled with snakes, ticks, chiggers, boar, and wildcats.
One of the most striking aspects about the book is the fact that even as a lawman, Harry's father found himself threatened at every corner, every time he asked a member of the town about anything concerning the women, because to do so was to cross one of the unspoken racial lines of the town. Eventually, Jacob came to hope that the killer was only a transient, a hope that was thwarted when it becomes clear that the killer was hell-bent upon refusing to cease in his campaign of terror.
The only...
Lansdale seems to mimic earlier Southern novels about just whites, plucky urchin children, and mysterious but good strangers in this narrative twist. The loss of innocence that comes, combined with how the innocence of the children sets the Goat Man free is predictable, rather than revelatory.
What is most powerful about the novel, however, is its raw atmospherics. The Bottoms in its title refers to many things -- the bottoms of the human heart's dark passions, the actual term for the country, and the bottoms to which people will sink. Also, at the end of the novel, in a final bit of social commentary, Harry, now in a nursing home, regrets that he can no longer run wild and free as a child in the wilds of the Bottoms of his youth. He mourns a lost Texas wilderness now paved over with stones and shopping malls. Although this final image is somewhat nostalgic, the unsparing quality of the rest of the narrative excuses Harry's rose-colored final gloss on his life, and seems truthful to his resilient character.
Works Cited
Lansdale, Joe. R. The Bottoms. New York: The Mysterious Press, 2003.
