Celebrating East Texas with Joe Lansdale, Kasey Lansdale, and Wes Ferguson

There’s something off-kilter about East Texas. It hosts a culture in which the traditions of the rural South and the rural West mix in strange patterns, echoing the forested fade between the bayous of Louisiana and the hills and plains of Texas. The perfect landscape, in other words, to give rise to a writer as all over the map as Joe R. Lansdale.

Lansdale, who’s been known to write  for the Observer on occasion, is a fiercely prolific author with an unabashedly weird sensibility. Over the course of his career he’s picked up eight Bram Stoker Awards and produced a small library’s worth of short fiction, novels, comics and screenplays ranging from supernatural Westerns to pineywoods noir.

Lansdale tells all his tales with a straight face that plays up the sly, wicked humor bubbling underneath. All of his work, fiction and nonfiction alike, is filtered through an absurdist sensibility that Lansdale attributes to his home region. “There’s plenty of noir right here in East Texas,” Lansdale wrote in an Observer piece a few years ago. “Though it’s mixed with Southern Gothic and Western and all manner of stuff; it’s a gumbo boiled in hell … Weird as some of it is, fictionalized as the work is, it comes from a wellspring of true events you just can’t make up.”

Lansdale will be at the Wittliff Collections in San Marcos on Thursday, Oct. 9 to participate in “East Texas in Story and Song,” an event celebrating literature based in the region. He’ll be joined by his daughter Kasey Lansdale, a country singer-songwriter who’s scheduled to perform selections from her new album, Restless. Also appearing is Wes Ferguson, author of Running the River: Secrets of the Sabine, and an East Texas journalist whose work has also appeared in the Observer.

The event is free, though guests are asked to RSVP to [email protected]. There will be a signing after the program.