Excerpt from the introduction by Joe Hill

Ice Water in Hell: An Introduction to the Best Horror Stories of Joe R. Lansdale
Joe Hill

It is common enough, in these sorts of introductions, to begin with the comparisons, placing the subject among the ranks of other literary stars. “Franklin F. Fring works in the bare-knuckled, sweaty-balled tradition of Mickey Spillane and Richard Prather.” “With his latest goblin-packed epic, Sven R. R. Hørstbörg joins such legends of fantasy as George R. R. Martin and J. R. R. Tolkien in having far too many Rs in the middle of his name.”

We’ll have to bypass that kind of thing here. It ain’t gonna work.

I was only thirteen when I read my first Lansdale. Was that too young? Maybe for some kids, but not for this kid. Nightmare on Elm Street was my idea of comfort viewing, and I had a vampire bat in a Lucite block on my desk (no one would sell a thing like that now, and no one would buy it either). I had already worked my way through all of Lovecraft and everything Clive Barker had published. One afternoon, my Dad said, “Check this one out” and tossed me a slim paperback copy of The Drive-In. I pounded it down in a single day, one sitting, something I have only done with three other books: Peter Benchley’s Jaws, John D. MacDonald’s A Nightmare in Pink, and Rex Miller’s Slob. When I was done, I couldn’t have told you what the fuck just hit me. The Drive-In was both shocking and ridiculous, like being run down by the clowns in their tiny neon-bright clown car: You’re laughing right up until the tires go over you. Then, when you’re screaming in the road, all the clowns pile out to finish the job by kicking you to death with their big silly clown shoes.

I had to read another one right away, and I did: The Nightrunners. That one got me even harder. No clowns here, but it still felt like a hit-and-run. The Nightrunners appalled and gripped in equal measure. It was as fascinating as watching a drop of blood slide down the edge of a mirror-bright straight razor.

What struck me then—and what is even clearer to me now—is that Lansdale’s stories were so radically unlike anything else anyone was doing in the genre, it was like he was a painter deploying an entirely new palette. Other painters were working with blues, with yellows, with reds. Joe was painting with leaded gasoline, shitty beer, ruptured organs, mothers’ tears. He was painting in shades of fury and scorn. The stories in this book here ring with laughter, but it’s a sickened, angry laughter, the disgusted laughter of the man who has watched someone from the Ku Klux Klan light his spotless white robes on fire with his own tiki torch.