Bottoms One of the Most

Bottoms

One of the most interesting aspects of the Bottoms, by Joe E. Lansdale, is the way that this book functions simultaneously as both a mystery tale and a historical novel of the American 20th century South. The book is involving and gripping in its narrative force, much like any mystery. The reader always wishes to turn the page -- the reader wants to find out a new clue as to 'who did it.' The question that drives the plot is 'who' engaged in a serial killing spree in a small East Texas town. However, the book also provides profound insight into what it was like, growing up during the height of Jim Crow segregation. Lansdale paints the portrait of a world where a man could be a member of a racist hate group like the Klan as part of his accepted daily, social life. The law was either complicit or powerless in the struggle to avenge wrongs done against Black men, and in the novel's case, Black women.

The novel is told as a flashback. Thus, it also suggests in its tone a coming-of-age novel as well as a novel of historical significance that is helpful for the reader. The reader identifies him or herself with a protagonist in an alien town, mindset, and era. The narrator is named Harry, who relates the series of the novel's horrific crimes through the eyes of a child. Harry's child's eye perspective enables the reader to approach events in a naive as well as a historical fashion. Also, it allows Lansdale to view the world through the perspective of an individual whose social relations have yet to have been completely tainted by hard-bitten racism.

At times, Harry and his brother Tom strike the reader as childish, such as their obsession with the Goat Man, a half-human, half-beast like creature lives beneath the suspended bridge across the river, where the first body lay. But at other times, their greater tolerance seems admirable and more mature than the residents of the town, whom are openly scornful of any suggestion of equality of rights and treatment of Blacks and Whites in Texas.

At the beginning of the novelistic frame tale, Harry is shown as an old man, living in a nursing home. But when he was eleven, he was a young and active boy, eagerly taking note of every development in the crime wave. At first the town wished to do nothing. Worse of all, because the victims were racially ostracized -- i.e. Black, and female as well, and also socially ostracized -- they were, because of their dress and reputation, apparently prostitutes -- no one seemed to care.

Harry recalls finding the first victim in the presence of his younger sister and his brother Tom. The memory scarred them, he says. Only the boy's father seemed to care about the dead woman, Harry remembers. Unlike most men of his color, class, and status, Jacob Crane, Harry's father, cared about justice. The Ku Klux Klan united against Crane in his pursuit of fairness and truth, even though Crane was a constable, one of the few representations of legal authority in what seems like a virtually lawless society.

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 disappointing twist to the novel is the rather cliched aspect of the 'the Goat Man' that the children pursue, since rather predictably, the individuals' involvement in the crimes comes clear, although the Goat Man is not the actual killer. 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.