Wet Juju

by Joe R. Lansdale

A ravenous cowboy hat-wearing mummy invades a rest home where possibly Elvis and John Kennedy reside, and it’s up to them to protect their home and stop its stealing of souls. A top hat wearing, razor-carrying demon from another dimension is found in an old house. An iconic bear with a taste for sex and mayhem meets an unsuspecting traveler on an airplane. A sentient set of false teeth with an insatiable appetite goes on a rampage. A Halloween monster that folds and fits in the trunk of a very strange car driven by nuns, pursues a carload of smart-ass teenagers. A gunslinger meets a peculiar set of ghosts and werewolves in an abandoned town. A black detective hunts for a lost recording tied to a deal with the devil, blues music, and a Lovecraftian creature with soul-claiming designs. A survivor of a zombie apocalypse hangs Christmas decorations. The ghost of an alien space traveler resides deep underground and can only be stopped by Dana Roberts, an expert at dealing with the supernormal.These are just a few of the stories in WET JUJU. Horror and weird tales, oddities that cling to the brain, lurk within the pages of this enormous volume of Lansdale goodness. Everything you need for happy nightmares.

Table of Contents:

Introduction by Joe R. Lansdale
Mr. Bear
By the Hair of the Head
My Dead Dog, Bobby
The Folding Man
The Hunt: Before, and After the Aftermath
Family
Once Upon A Time
God of the Razor
What Happened To Me
The Bleeding Shadow
Death Before Bed
A Visit with Friends
Christmas with the Dead
The White Rabbit
Dread Island
Dog
Dead Sister
The Gentleman's Hotel
In the Mad Mountains
The Redheaded Dead
A Hard-On For Horror: Low Budget Excitement
The Case of the Angry Traveler
Boots
Regular Sex and Admiration
An Arrow in the Air
Dog, Cat, and Baby
Levitation
Bubba Ho-Tep
Hanging
Apocalypse
Love Doll: A Fable
December
King of Shadows
The Bones that Walk
Hole
The Junkyard
Chompers
Huitzilopochtli
Torn Away


Signed Limited Hardcover Edition:
Limited to only 550 signed and hand-numbered copies
Personally signed by the author, cover artist, and interior artist on a specially designed signature page
Larger 6.14” x 9.21” trim size
Printed on 90gsm acid-free paper
Bound in cloth with coloured head and tail bands
Hot foil stamping on the front boards and spine
Offset printed and bound with full-colour endpapers
Sewn binding for increased durability
Epic dust jacket artwork by Vincent Chong
Including over TWENTY interior illustrations by Ben Baldwin

Genres: Horror

710 pages, Hardcover

Published December 31, 2020

About the author

Champion Mojo Storyteller Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over forty novels and numerous short stories. His work has appeared in national anthologies, magazines, and collections, as well as numerous foreign publications. He has written for comics, television, film, newspapers, and Internet sites. His work has been collected in more than two dozen short-story collections, and he has edited or co-edited over a dozen anthologies. He has received the Edgar Award, eight Bram Stoker Awards, the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Grinzani Cavour Prize for Literature, the Herodotus Historical Fiction Award, the Inkpot Award for Contributions to Science Fiction and Fantasy, and many others. His novella Bubba Ho-Tep was adapted to film by Don Coscarelli, starring Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis. His story "Incident On and Off a Mountain Road" was adapted to film for Showtime's "Masters of Horror," and he adapted his short story "Christmas with the Dead" to film hisownself. The film adaptation of his novel Cold in July was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and the Sundance Channel has adapted his Hap & Leonard novels for television.

He is currently co-producing several films, among them The Bottoms, based on his Edgar Award-winning novel, with Bill Paxton and Brad Wyman, and The Drive-In, with Greg Nicotero. He is Writer In Residence at Stephen F. Austin State University, and is the founder of the martial arts system Shen Chuan: Martial Science and its affiliate, Shen Chuan Family System. He is a member of both the United States and International Martial Arts Halls of Fame. He lives in Nacogdoches, Texas with his wife, dog, and two cats.

Reviews

[Lou · Rating 5 out of 5]

One could say Lonsdale’s writing is a genre of its own.
I figure this also by his own words in introduction:
“The bulk of my work actually mixes genres, and in time the best of them are part of only one genre that counts to me. The Lonsdale genre.”

Stories inspired from his own dreams onto the page evident right of the bat with first story in this collection Mr. Bear, onwards down the rabbit hole Lansdale takes you page after page into realms new, fun, and dangerous.

This was a real treat, and the most enjoyable reads and discoveries this year, with stories from an author i have loved his works in the past, there are some that did not work for me but the ones that did are golden nuggets of horror, weird and great conjurings with vivid telling and escapism from this pandemic times we are living.
The publishers S.S.T, Short Scary Tales Publishers, have done a great job putting this together and thank you to them for the opportunity to read these hard to find good short tales.

Few minutes after adding last few stories I reviewed including King of Shadows I must mention he maybe a King of the Shadows with words.

Check reviews of short stories on my page -->https://more2read.com/review/wet-juju-by-joe-r-lansdale/

[Craig Childs · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the third of a massive four-volume retrospective of Joe R. Lansdale's short fiction from SST Publications. This volume focuses on his horror fiction, although be warned that some of these stories are so funny you cannot stop laughing long enough to be scared. Most of these stories have been previously collected but some are new.

This collection contains some of Lansdale's best stories, but it also includes a handful of amateurish early tales and several pieces of flash fiction best forgotten. (I would have preferred more Jebediah Mercer and Dana Roberts stories!)

My individual story reviews are below:

Mr. Bear – Begins as absurdist fantasy (a man sits down next to Smoky the Bear on an airplane) and ends up as satire. Like a lot of celebrities, Smoky turns out to have problems with alcohol, women, and of course people who start forest fires. Very funny.

By the Hair of the Head -- A young writer rents a room with a grizzled lighthouse keeper who believes he can talk to the soul of his long-dead daughter. An old-fashioned, eerie, atmospheric ghost story effectively told.

My Dead Dog, Bobby -- This dark, funny story starts with the sentence "My dead dog Bobby don't do tricks no more..." It ends with pedicide and matricide. Adapted into a memorable (and definitely disturbing!) illustrated children's book in 1995.

The Folding Man --A boy moons a car full of nuns on Halloween night. They are not nice nuns. They carry both a grudge and a powerful supernatural monster. I thought this story was average, but it won the 2010 Bram Stoker Award.

The Hunt: Before, and After the Aftermath -- A husband travels by train with his wife, hoping a long hunting trip vacation will allow them to reconcile their marriage in the wake of a devastating infidelity. This is an emotional character-driven story, somehow heightened by the surprising twist they are hunting the living dead, including the zombie woman he was unfaithful with.

Family -- Billy helps the ghost of his friend Jimmy let go of earthly entanglements so his soul can enter eternal rest. This is a weak premise for a story to begin with, and it is not helped by too many surprise endings. A bad parody of The Sixth Sense.

Once Upon A Time -- Two primitives, Ug and Gar, tell monster stories by a campfire. Ug relates being chased through the woods and barely escaping an unnamed ancient terror. This story does not have a proper ending; it just stops as if the author got bored with the idea.

God of the Razor -- Introduces Lansdale's most iconic villain: an unstoppable demon of knives, razors, and other sharp things who traverses between dimensions. The title character features heavily in the novel The Nightrunners. He has also appeared in numerous sequel stories, he fought Batman in the DC universe, and he starred in his own graphic novel Blood and Shadows.

What Happened To Me -- A haunted house story that turns out not to be about a haunted house, or even a ghost. Well written and poignant.

The Bleeding Shadow --JRL’s take on the legend of Robert Johnson with a heavy dose of Lovecraft and blues music. I love this story because it does not reveal whether it is a horror story or a crime thriller until the midway point.

Death Before Bed -- A fun poem that evokes memories of reading stories in bed as a child, just before falling asleep, at the point when the stories and your dreams merge into a seamless experience.

A Visit with Friends -- A zombie story with an adult twist: some people want to include the zombies in their kinky sex play! 

Christmas with the Dead -- Follows in the pulp tradition of JRL’s other post-apocalyptic tales like "On the Far Side of Cadillac Desert with Dead Folk" and "Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man's Back". Only Lansdale could stage a Christmas celebration in the middle of a zombie war. Highly inventive. Originally published in hardback in the U.K, and also adapted into an independent film.

The White Rabbit -- An academic encounters the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland while exploring Cairo at night. He assumes he must be having a benign dream. Only belatedly does he realize Osiris the God of the Dead also appeared in rabbit form, and tonight's ritual might be more dangerous than anything Lewis Carroll ever dreamed of.

Dread Island -- A literary mashup. Narrated by Huck Finn, it follows Huck and Tom Sawyer to a haunted island where they find the corpse of Captain Hook, join with Brer Rabbit to fight the Tar Baby, encounter an H.P. Lovecraft monster, and ultimately meet Amelia Earhart. Highly imaginative but unevenly paced. The author nails the Huck Finn voice almost perfectly. This novella was previously published as a limited-edition chapbook.

Dog -- A man on a bicycle is chased by a large dog intent on killing him-- maybe the dog is rabid, or maybe it is a hound of Hell! A fun man vs. nature survival story with the merest suggestion of the supernatural.

Dead Sister -- A private investigator in 1958 is hired to find out who is robbing local graves and why. Another blend of supernatural and noir. Light but entertaining.

The Gentleman's Hotel -- Rev. Jebediah Mercer, the protagonist from Dead in the West, is trapped in a brothel full of ghosts, fighting six Spanish conquistadors-turned-werewolves. I always enjoy these stories; they are dark but retain a sort of tongue-in-cheek campiness and energy that is fun to revisit. My favorite line: "It happened faster than you can skin your foreskin back for a soapin' ".

In the Mad Mountains -- When their cruise ship mysteriously sinks in polar waters, Gavin and Amelia find themselves explorers in a frozen landscape full of surrealistic horrors. The tension in this adventure story is palpable and visceral and almost unbearably constant. Perhaps the best Lovecraft pastiche I have read. It surpasses what Harlan Ellison, George R. R. Martin, and Charles Stross did with the mythos. It is at least on par with Kij Johnson's Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe and Lansdale's own earlier "Bleeding Shadows".

The Redheaded Dead -- Rev. Jebediah Mercer vanquishes a vampire descended from the line of Judas Iscariot. Retains the gothic atmosphere of the rest of the series, while emulating the style of Robert E. Howard.

A Hard-On For Horror -- An essay about the Bible and low budget horror movies. Includes such zingers as "God comes across in the Old Testament as someone whose caffeine level should be strictly monitored."

The Case of the Angry Traveler -- A Dana Roberts story. An exterminator finds the ruins of an ancient city below the sewers. This story goes far afield, with a mythology involving aliens and ghosts and space travel.

Boots -- Beware a bodiless pair of boots with a will of their own. Flash fiction.

Regular Sex and Admiration -- A young man makes a deal with the devil: "I want sex and I want respect. I get neither." Flash fiction.

An Arrow in the Air -- An archer's wayward shot creates a chain of causal events that leaves a trail of death in its wake. Flash fiction.

Dog, Cat, and Baby -- The arrival of an infant upsets an already delicate domestic balance. Another nasty short-short with a surprise bloody ending.

Levitation -- A man is surprised to find he can levitate his car while driving. Flash fiction.

Bubba Ho-Tep -- Years after switching lives with an impersonator, the real Elvis Presley is still alive in a nursing home in East Texas. He can barely find any reason to go on living, until an ancient Egyptian mummy begins sucking out patients' souls in the dead of night. Elvis must team with an elderly black man who claims to be John F. Kennedy in order to save the residents of Mud Creek Shady Grove Convalescence Home. It may sound like the worst B-movie plot imaginable, but this story works because it is really about aging, loneliness, and finding a cause worth living for. Nominated for a Bram Stoker Award in 1994.

Hanging -- The narrator's suicide attempt goes wrong: his neck breaks but his mind is still very much alive. Flash fiction.

Apocalypse -- An eight-line poem about what comes after the fall of civilization.

Love Doll: A Fable -- A man loses control of his sex toy after she starts walking, talking, and thinking for herself. While it is a bit "on the nose" as an allegory, this is still a very funny (and vaguely horrifying) story about the nature of relationships.

December - A gnarled misshapen old man wanders the streets in the waning hours of the last day of the year. Flash fiction.

King of Shadows -- Leroy bullies his new adopted brother Draighton, whose father was possessed by a demon and killed Draighton's mother before committing suicide. This direct sequel to "God of the Razor" features a nice blend of humor and horror, but it is not as good as the original.

The Bones that Walk -- A cowboy finds the Dutchman Miner's treasure map to a cave filled with gold. He risks everything--his family and his ranch-- to get that gold… but it is guarded by a horde of otherworldly creatures who admit no trespassers. A weird western in the same vein as the Jebediah Mercer stories.

Hole - Three children try to dig a hole to China in their backyard, but someone--or some thing--is waiting for them. Flash fiction.

The Junkyard -- Five friends who meet for a monthly poker game are terrorized by a tentacled Lovecraftian monster that emerges from the trunk of a '57 Cadillac. This is an early atmospheric tale that almost works, but the plot elements never quite coalesce into a satisfying resolution. The monster reminded me of the hive creature Lansdale created for Bubba Ho-Tep and the Cosmic Blood Suckers.

Chompers -- A homeless woman finds a pair of dentures sitting in a pool of blood in a dark alley. She tries them on, reasoning it is better to chew her food, even if the teeth once belonged to someone else. Hilarity and bloodshed ensue.

Huitzilopochtli -- Dag and Kevin hike to an old cabin on a wintry night, where she tells him the family legend about an Aztec idol and her grandfather's quest for eternal youth. This is a fun if predictable ghost story.

Torn Away -- A dead Civil War soldier is resurrected by a witch and separated from his shadow. Now, he can assume any form he wishes and is immortal-- as long as the shadow does not catch up to him. A blend of horror and whimsy written for a Twilight Zone tribute anthology.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a definite 5 star collection (and over 700 pages!), collection mostly 'horror' type stories from Joe Lansdale.

Some of my personal favorites were (in order of appearance):
The Bleeding Shadow
Dread Island
The Gentleman's Hotel
In the Mad Mountains
The Case of the Angry Traveler
The Bones that Walk

I highly recommend this collection!