VANILLA RIDE. By Joe R. Lansdale. Knopf. 243 pages. $24.95.
"For all you Hap and Leonard fans. Bless your weird little hearts." That dedication in the front matter of this book tells me I'm in for something out of the ordinary. Then, in the first chapter, I find narrator-protagonist Hap Collins lying in post-coital bliss with his girlfriend. To be totally accurate, I actually only deduce Hap's name because of his reference to "Little Hap" who had just been "looking for a place to hide." Then I meet Hap's girlfriend, Brett, who claims she hasn't had that much fun since she "pistol-whipped a red-headed midget." Then I learn that she actually had pistol-whipped a red-headed midget (or "dwarf" as Hap correctly corrects) in addition to setting her ex-husband's head on fire and putting it out with a shovel. Riiiiiiight …
Sex scenes don't usually come on the first page of a novel, and to risk cliché, I must add the disclaimer, "no pun intended," but it did work out pretty nicely, didn't it? That is an example of the kind of innuendo you can expect to encounter on any page of this book. There is so much playful sex talk in this story that I began annotating it with an acronym to save time. But be warned, if strong language and toilet humor offend you, read something else. On the flip side, if you enjoy irreverent comedians who overstep social boundaries, I can't think of a better book to endorse. This author will say anything! Plus, it's a fun story.
Chapter 1 is barely a page long but, short as it is, verifies what I assumed after reading the dedication; this is one unique book. Protagonists in most novels are ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances, or they are larger-than-life heroes. Hap, the protagonist of Vanilla Ride, is a lovable loser. A day laborer. A simple man with simple needs. He is a white, East Texas, Diet Coke-chugging heterosexual whose best friend, Leonard, is a rough and ready, tough-as-nails, gay black man with a penchant for punching out anyone at any time with no thought to the consequences -- but only if they deserve it, of course.
A more unlikely pair is difficult to imagine -- which is part of why it works. What Hap and Leonard have in common is the habit of trying to set the world straight when things are amiss. And as this is the seventh book in the Hap and Leonard series, I can assume they have set quite a few things straight -- although Leonard might argue that my use of the word "straight" is a perversion, since being "straight" is so obviously unnatural.
In this installment, Hap and Leonard find trouble when they help an injured ex-cop friend by retrieving his runaway granddaughter from a den of drug-dealing gang-bangers whose heads they bounce off the pavement, walls and floor during the process. Little do they know that these head-busted thugs are merely the bottom tier of a large and powerful Dixie Mafia, the leaders of which will not stand to be disrespected by any two-bit rural "peckerwoods." What follows is a comedic, high-speed, guns a-blazin' escapade pitting Hap and Leonard who, as Hap puts it, "…together sometimes can only manage the IQ level of a ground squirrel …" against thugs, crooked cops and all manner of unclean beast.
The results are tense, hilarious, perverse and sometimes just plain sick -- in a playful stomp-in-a-mud-puddle sort of way.
Steven Beach is a writer who lives in Lawsonville.
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