Daniel (@dungeondive) returns to Shelf by Shelf with two shelves given largely to Joe R. Lansdale — an author he warns “starts where other authors would draw a line.” He describes Lansdale as Mark Twain meets Stephen King: gorgeous prose married to crass, violent, fearless subject matter. The tour rolls through the Hap and Leonard novels, the signed small-press collections he hunted across Seattle’s used bookshops, and his single favourite Lansdale piece, the hardcore chapbook Steppin’ Out, Summer '68. From there he shifts gears to Clifford D. Simak — pastoral golden-age science fiction, with Way Station (“if John Steinbeck wrote SF”) named Simak’s best and City close behind. He closes on a prized set of book-club hardbacks of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, found by luck in a Poulsbo bookshop, alongside the essay collection The Castle of the Otter. Wolfe draws his highest praise and his favourite line on the craft: “all fiction is fantasy — some is just more honest about it.” A rich, collector’s-eye ramble through three very different masters.
Lansdale “starts where other authors would draw a line.” Is that fearlessness the draw for you, or the thing that keeps you away?