Not the best Lansdale has to offer but still good."Edge of Dark Water" is the story of three friends who embark on a journey down the Sabine River in east Texas. Their reason for going is ostensibly to take the ashes of their dead friend, May Lynn, to Hollywood because she always aspired to be an actress and make it big in Hollywood. The underlying reason for their trip is to escape the confines of their lives, and each of the three suffers in different ways. Sue Ellen is the narrator of the sto...

3.5 starsSue Ellen and her friends are helping her daddy fish (poison the fish with green walnuts because her daddy is lazy) and they end up finding the body of one of Sue Ellen's friends in the Sabine River. She has been tied to an old sewing machine so that she doesn't come back up, Sue Ellen's daddy and her uncle both want to just throw the body back in the river but the kids won't let them. The story is set back in the Depression so finding a body was not the big deal it has become today. He...

Imma quote Clairee's famous line from that play set in the magnolia-dotted, small Louisiana town: if you don't have anything nice to say... come sit by me.Pull up a chair, darlin. Lansdale seems to be loved by lots of southern literary fans, but Im sorry to say that this second of his books that Ive read doesn't count me as one of them. The story is narrated by a 16 year old East Texas gal back in the Depression era. Her two best friends and her Cure-All sipping mama accompany her in this road-...

After reading THE BOTTOMS by Joe R. Lansdale, I had a sneaking suspicion he was using his stories to break my heart and after just finishing EDGE OF DARK WATER, this suspicion has been confirmed. Joe R. Lansdale is indeed trying to break my heart.He’s coming after my soul.He’s weaseling into my life and stealing retail space on my bookshelf.Proof:The thing is, I have fully surrendered. I’m allowing it. Game on. EDGE OF DARK WATER is the story of some kids growing up as best they can in rural Tex...

this book was just okay. it's a little east texas huck finn-ette story about a bunch of misfits who take to a raft after their friend is found at the bottom of the river with her hands wrapped in wire and attached to a sewing machine. turns out, she has a map to some buried cash, so they decide to take the money and her ashes to scatter her in hollywood, which is where she would have been headed had she not been, you know, murdered.so all the misfit toys escape their demons and go on a river tri...

A teenage girl with Hollywood aspirations's body is pulled out of the Sabine River. Her friends Sue Ellen, Jinx, Terry set out to spread her ashes in Hollywood. Unfortunately, some money the deceased girl's brother stole winds up in their possession and numerous ill-tempered people are on their trail. And a murderer named Skunk has been hired to get the money back at any cost. Will Sue Ellen and her friends survive their river odyssey?Joe Lansdale weaves a coming of age tale set in east Texas. I...

I must alert you, do you smell something in the air? No?Good!As that would have been a sign that the myth of the Skunk Man is real, his presence is known by a skunk like smell. A legend or a myth, be he what you please, he is a character that Lansdale has created in this story of fiction. He certainly adds a thrill to the tale. Skunk man presents death, a bogeyman like character that one shall tell tales of and our main characters in this story hope to be not true.Sue Ellen a young woman, sixtee...

Another wonderful adventure involving youth and harrowing experiences. Great characters and a great read from the Champion Mojo Storyteller Hisownself :)

Is there a more prolific writer of westerns than Joe Lansdale? Endlessly inventive, Lansdale has both a series featuring Hap & Leonard, and a slew of standalones in which he shares the way even good people can get themselves in a bad way in a world with evil in it. In this novel, published in 2012 by Mulholland Books, 16-year-old Sue Ellen is narrating. She lives in a small southern town and has two friends her age: a white gay boy named Terry who is reluctant to let anyone know his inclinations...

I'm really becoming a fan of Lansdale. Starting to think that his Drive In books were just a one off, since all other books I've read by his were excellent. This one reminded me of The Bottoms. Same lyrical quality. Always the same location, and, while I may never develop appreciation for East Texas or see its charms, it certainly makes for a good story setting. This one takes place somewhere in the 1930's and there is something incredibly powerful and honest about the way Lansdale describes the...

Great characterization, good plot, took me a bit to really get into it, but once they got moving down the river I was hooked (see what I did there?)Bonus points for a scene that literally made me jump. This is no hyperbole, and I honestly can't remember the last time I was scared bad enough to flinch while reading a book (14 years old reading the tunnel scene in THE STAND maybe?), but there's a scene toward the end, one paragraph in particular, that made me catch the vapors. It was so bitchin'.T...

"Mama, if you had a friend got drowned, and you found her body, and she always wanted to go to Hollywood to be a movie star, would it be wrong to dig her up after she was buried, burn her to ashes, take them down to Gladewater in a jar, catch a bus, and take her out to Hollywood?"Yeah...strange as that sounds, the above paragraph is, in a nutshell, the plot of this book.Poor May Lynn! An East Texas girl with only one dress to wear, she had big dreams of being a star, but she ended up dead in the...

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, the voices of the young people were distinctive, & the phrases they used made me laugh out loud. The pacing was good, many threats to overcome. It slowed a bit while they resided with the pastor, but the arrival of their various pursuers, particularly Skunk, got things moving right along. I cared about Sue Ellen, Jinx, and Terry, and found their irreverent and pragmatic views on life and their relatives quite refreshing. Some thought this was not Lansdale’s best,

3 stars because I kept turning pages to see what would happen, and because the voice of the narrator and her two friends were wonderful (especially Jinx). But there were a lot of inconsistencies in this story and a remarkable dead body count in 300 pages, with law enforcement either part of it or looking the other way out of laziness. A nice entertainment for a warm afternoon on my screened porch, but nothing more.

Having finished this book, one will know they did not just read a novel — they had an experience.East Texas, 1933. A teenaged girl’s corpse is found, tied, in a river. After her burial, her three friends decide to exhume and cremate her body and transfer it to Hollywood — the Land of Dreams, especially in 1930s rural America — where their now-deceased friend always dreamt of going. She wanted to be a star.And that’s only where the story begins.Out from there unravels a mystifying tale of murder

“I figure when you got right down to it, we weren’t fresh thieves after all, but had had plenty of practice in the cane fields and watermelon patches. Heck, I had started my life of crime sometime back, but had just then realized it. The natural move forward would be to take stolen bank money and spend it on a trip to Hollywood with a dead girl burnt up in a jar.”Edge of Dark Water is a coming-of-age tale told in the way that so few can. Alongside authors like King, McGuire and McCammon, Champio...

Good Lord, can Joe Lansdale write! The images he manages to evoke of the deep South (alright: East Texas) at the start of the Depression are so vivid and majestic, you can smell the rot and feel the snakes slithering over your shoes. And that's exactly where he's aiming you. Edge of Dark Water (dt:Dunkle Gewässer) is a mix of a few genres. 1. The traditional "river narrative" that is meant as a metaphor for the course of life itself. "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" being the most well-known...

An atmospheric period piece which unearths the diluted humanity of a time where equal stature regardless of gender, race, and sexual preference was unheard of rendering one class above all with the rest left to fight for scraps. The trials and tribulations of the underclass documented within ‘Edge of Dark Water’ are confronting, raw, and powerful. For Sue Ellen, living amongst the perpetual weary dream-like trance of her parental figures who either ignore or pay her too much unwanted attention,

reread review October, 2018I enjoyed this as much the second time around as the first. I really believe that listening is the way to go with Edge of Dark Water. Angele Masters is true to her name - masterful! This starts out seeming like a straight-forward story about people living in poverty in 1930's depression-era deep east Texas and the quest of three teenagers to get out of town. But it develops to include local swamp folk tales, best told round the campfire. Is Skunk - the ugly stinky evil...

PROTAGONIST: Sue Ellen WilsonSETTING: Depression era East TexasSERIES: StandaloneRATING: 5.0Have you ever finished reading a book and found yourself having to fall back in your chair and take a deep breath while you marvel at its wonderfulness? That’s what happened to me when I read EDGE OF DARK WATER; moreover, I felt that somehow it had become part of my very being. I was amazed to find myself loving EDGE so much. It’s been a few years since I’ve had that experience; I feared that I had become...