EDGE OF DARK WATER

If you’ve read Joe Lansdale before you won’t need to read this review; you’ll read his latest anyway. 

If you haven’t read him, read this, an astounding tale of a small group (it varies from three to five) escaping from serious trouble in down-home backwoods Texas by sailing a raft down river through lands stalked by danger and controlled by no one. 

Sounds a bit like Huckleberry Finn?  This is a hundred times better.  Brilliantly narrated by teenage Sue Ellen, the tale begins with the corpse of her beautiful star-struck friend being dredged from the river and almost thrown back in to avoid the hassle, and continues as her friends take her ashes and a cache of stolen money for a long trip on that raft. 

Don’t expect a Huck Finn idyll: this is Lansdale, dark and comic, bleak and terrifying, romantic and endearing.  People may classify this as genre fiction; it is not.  This, I kid you not, is the Great American Novel of the year.