With the help of the fine folks at The StoryGraph, we’re giving away THINGS GET UGLY: THE BEST CRIMES STORIES OF JOE R. LANSDALE.

A potent blend of stories from one of the all-time greats, THINGS GET UGLY is the kind of collection you never want to end—as it shows the versatility and command of the craft only a legend like Lansdale can execute. There’s a reason Lansdale is among the greatest, and this book showcases his knack for shady characters, rural noir, and an innate ability to get to the heart of what drives us all. A can’t-miss book.

—Alex Segura, bestselling author of Secret Identity

Wildly entertaining, binge-worthy, and a total escape from hum drum reality, THINGS GET UGLY is pure Joe Lansdale on terrific display. In this collection of his greatest crime fiction stories, Lansdale’s scalpel-sharp wit and prose will have you cackling one minute while it chills you to the bone the next. A rollicking, sometimes haunted trip through his piney-woods soaked noir landscape, THINGS GET UGLY confirms that Joe Lansdale is to crime fiction what Willie Nelson is to country music: wholly original, genre-defying, raw, gritty, soulful, and lastly, timeless. I could not put this book down!

—May Cobb, author of The Hunting Wives

Edgar Award winner Joe R. Lansdale (the Hap and Leonard series) returns to the piney, dangerous woods of East Texas. In this career retrospective of his best crime stories, Lansdale shows exactly why critics continue to compare him to Elmore Leonard, Donald Westlake, Flannery O’Connor, and William Faulkner.

Foreword by S. A. Cosby, author of the New York Times bestseller Razorblade Tears

Lansdale’s writing hits like a brass-knuckled punch to the face: Hard and nasty and visceral. This collection of nineteen ugly stories shows the master of the crime thriller at the height of his formidable powers.

—Marc Guggenheim, creator of Arrow and Legends of Tomorrow

In the 1950s, a young small-town projectionist mixes it up with a violent gang. When Mr. Bear is not alerting us to the dangers of forest fires, he lives a life of debauchery and murder. A brother and sister travel to Oklahoma to recover the dead body of their uncle. A lonely man engages in dubious acts while pining for his rubber duckie.

In this collection of nineteen unforgettable crime tales, Joe R. Lansdale brings his legendary mojo and witty grit to harrowing heists, revenge, homicide, and mayhem. No matter how they begin, things are bound to get ugly—and fast.

The spiritual heir to both Walt Whitman and Elmore Leonard, Joe R. Lansdale is the bard who sings America: in gem-hard, polished prose that never lets up, no matter how ugly things get. As they do indeed in the seminal retrospective that is THINGS GET UGLY, where vicious people do vicious things to each other beautifully. It should stand next to Leonard’s Three-Ten to Yuma as a remarkable testament to the power of short fiction.

—Lavie Tidhar, author of Central Station and Neom

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword by S. A. Cosby
Introduction by Joe R. Lansdale

“The Steel Valentine”
“Driving to Geronimo’s Grave”
“Mr. Bear”
“The Job”
“Six Finger Jack”
“The Shadows, Kith and Kin”
“The Ears”
“Santa at the Café”
“I Tell You It’s Love”
“Dead Sister”
“Booty and the Beast”
“Boys Will Be Boys”
“Billie Sue”
“The Phone Woman”
“Dirt Devils”
“Drive in Date”
“Rainy Weather”
“Incident On and Off a Mountain Road”
“The Projectionist”

Of all my writing, the short story is my favorite form of expression,” says Lansdale, and his joy shows in the exuberant invention of these noirish tales. A few of them, like ‘The Steel Valentine’ and ‘Six-Finger Jack,’ are unpredictable but routine, and a few others, like the spooky ‘The Shadows, Kith and Kin’ and the supernatural 1958 private eye story ‘Dead Sister,’ play more to Lansdale’s wide-ranging interests than to his storytelling strengths. But even entries that don’t entirely come off, from ‘Mr. Bear’ (a man develops a surprising friendship with the psycho bear who sits next to him on a plane) to ‘Boys Will Be Boys’ (a pair of kids who ‘feed off each other’ descend into a pit of sex, drugs, and depravity), are fueled by some wildly deranged premises, and the best of them, like the supershort ‘The Job’ (an Elvis impersonator is hired as a hit man) and ‘The Ears’ (a third date is spun into a nightmare by a casual discovery), strike a note of giddy brutality other authors would find hard to match. If there’s a general weakness here apart from some sex scenes even kinky readers may find disturbing, it’s Lansdale’s fondness for killing off virtually the entire cast of so many entries. Even so, the hits keep on coming. Though the final twist in ‘Santa at the Café’ is the most predictable of all, the climactic twist in ‘Incident On and Off a Mountain Road,’ probably the single strongest story here, will stay with you for a long time.

—Kirkus

As Matt Damon’s character Sonny Vaccaro says in his final climactic pitch to Michael Jordan in Air, ‘the rest of us just want a chance to touch that greatness.’ When you read THINGS GET UGLY, you will do just that.

—Strand Magazine