Red Range: A Wild Western Adventure by Joe R. LansdaleMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
When the vigilante Red Mask stops a lynching and sends some KKK members to the grave, he goes on the run with a young boy named Turon. The remaining Klansmen chase Red Mask and Turon all the way into a Lost World in the bowels of the Earth...
I've been a Joe Lansdale fan for thirty years at this point and I enjoyed the Lansdale/Truman/Glanzman collaboration on the three Jonah Hex series they did for Vertigo so I have no idea how this slipped under my radar around the turn of the century. Fortunately, I grabbed it during one of It's Alive press's "help us not go out of business" sales.
The book grabs you by the genitals with a brutal lynching and doesn't let up, twisting them a little more every couple pages. The Red Mask could end a drought with all the blood he spills by the time the Lost World part of the book comes into play.
The writing is vintage Lansdale, a harsh judgement on racism punctuated by hilarious dialog and extreme violence. Sam Glanzman had to be around 70 when this came out but his gritty artwork is top notch, reminding me of Joe Kubert, although they probably shared influences. The dinosaurs were just bloody icing on the cake of corpses.
I went into this cold so I had no idea there was a Lost World component, although it wasn't incredibly surprising since Uncle Joe has been known to weave a Lost World yarn or two in his day. I'm glad to hear the sequel is in the works since this book ends a little abruptly.
Red Range hits all the buttons for me. White supremacists gets their brains splattered everywhere, there is hilarious crude humor, and dinosaurs to boot. Five out of five stars.
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