Published between 1896 and 2010, the stories collected in Deadman's Road are individual but bound together by the anti-hero, Reverend Jedidiah Mercer. Van Helsing, Solomon Kane, Jonah Hex, and a host of other dark pulp heroes his contemporaries, Mercer lives by the gun, bible, and whiskey. His character wholly gray, Mercer possesses a sharp tongue, short temper, and an irascible lack of patience in delivering hard justice to the creatures and peoples of the world, all in the name of God. Without his character, the stories wouldn't be half of what they are. And for the concerned, it's clear there is no underlying religious message; the Rev's hardline beliefs are just color for character. Zombies outnumber Bible quotes 100 to 1.
I harp on about prose on this blog, and Deadman's Road is a case where prose, along with the main character, make the stories readable. Where H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith's baroque styles turn reading into a grind that too overtly attempts to give stiff substance to a soft medium, Lansdale's clean, straight-forward style admits that the medium is soft but ensures pace is good and the act of reading painless, even pleasureful. In other words, Lansdale understands the fundamentals of technique. The sugar cube melts effortlessly without pretensions to being a cake.
The collection kicks off with a long novella/short novel “Dead in the West”. While a vampire/zombie/skeleton rush at the climax, things start innocently enough. Mercer arrives in town to give a sermon, and after stabling his horse and organizing a meeting tent, settles in. Little to his knowledge, however, are the happenings of the town before his arrival. A medicine man had come with the most miraculous cures, something which the townsfolk immediately took a liking to. But when one cure went bad, they turned on him, and a curse was brought down on their town. The shadows not the safest place to be, soon enough the Reverend needs more than just his god to lift the curse.
The collection's title story finds the Reverend riding in the desert. Stopping at a campfire for the night, he is roped into helping a sheriff and his deputy escort a dangerous prisoner down a particularly dangerous road. Naturally, things do not go according to plan. “The Gentleman's Hotel” tells of Mercer arriving in a ghost town and there meeting the lone survivor of a stage coach attack. The town empty for a reason, Mercer must fight the canine remnants of the town's history to set it free. “The Crawling Sky” has the Reverend deep in the countryside, far from civilization, battling a Lovecraftian horror that has more than one surprise up its sleeve. And the final story in the collection, as well as the only previously unpublished selection, “The Dark Down There” finds the Reverend ambushed on the road and forced to investigate the supernatural inhabitants of a mine. The underground uncanny ensues.
In the end, Deadman's Road is Weird West pulp entertainment through and through. Lansdale keeps things palatable for intelligent readers, however, through two things—perhaps two-and-a-half: quality, idiosyncratic prose, a gray main character, and the half: colorful imagination. A graphic novel in prose form, or perhaps splatterhouse in fictional form, it's up to the reader whether the imaginative half is full or empty. While the aforementioned Jonah Hex, Solomon Kane, etc. are Mercer's contemporaries, the authors of those stories are not Lansdale. In terms of style, someone like Edgar Rice Burroughs is a much better comparison, meaning fans of Burrough's may do well to investigate the collection.
The following are the five stories contained in Deadman's Road:
Dead in the West [novel]
Deadman's Road
The Gentleman's Hotel
The Crawling Sky
The Dark Down There
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