Rohrig: I would like to go back to talk about THE BOAR since you mentioned that. THE BOAR seems to be very similar to Mad Dog Summer.

Lansdale: Oh, yes. What I will say about this is that I loved the tone, and I kind of liked the family. When I started writing Mad Dog Summer, I found that although the family had a different name, in many ways, I was writing a more mature story about that family. And you know I added things, changed things a little bit, but I realized that this was something I had only explored peripherally. Part of the reason for that was when I was doing the young adult book, I needed to keep it simple, the number of characters simple. I just wanted to tell this very simple story. Mad Dog Summer in its own way is a simple story. There's an echo there of so many stories my parents told me. My father was forty-something when I was born, and my mother was in her late thirties or early forties, so they had lived in the depression. My father was born in 1909, for example, the year THE MAGIC WAGON takes place coincidentally. They had told me a lot of stories about the depression, about that time, so that's very much inside me. I grew up in East Texas. I was born in 1951. In the fifties and the early sixties, up until the middle sixties, Texas wasn't a whole lot different -- at least East Texas rather -- than it had been in the thirties and the forties. So I think I have a real good feel for that, and the people I grew up with -- the language was of that era. A lot of my language is a confusion of eras, you know. So it was very easy for me to tap into that. Also there were literary influences, of course. Flannery O Connor. Harper Lee's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD. I'm sure the echo of that runs throughout. But really it was more the echo of the stories I heard. Not all of them are transferred exactly as they were told to me, but elements. The family -- the mother and father -- are not like my mother and father. They're quite a bit different, but there are echoes of them here and there.

Rohrig: I understand that Mad Dog Summer inspired THE BOTTOMS. How different is THE BOTTOMS?

Lansdale: Well, THE BOTTOMS has some of the same story structure, but it's very different, in that there are a lot more characters. There are a lot more incidents.

Rohrig: Are you dealing with the same characters, Richard and Abraham (from THE BOAR)?

Lansdale: Well, no. Richard and Abraham actually do appear in the book -- very briefly, almost in cameos -- and so really I do divide those into two different families, but it is very influenced. In the novel I sort of broadened my view of it, so it's left the family in Mad Dog Summer and the family that inspired it from THE BOAR. It's more an outgrowth inspired by that. I put them in there in a way almost to let you know they aren't the same family. But they make their appearances, and so does... this is before hog Jesse's death, although that doesn't legitimately work with the timeline of the two novels, but I took that liberty.

Rohrig: So THE BOTTOMS, in essence, is a broader work.

Lansdale: A much broader work. I'm near the end of it now.

Rohrig: What are your hopes for that?

Lansdale: I'm at that stage of the novel where I don't know how I feel about it anymore. It's near the end. I'm sort of tired of it. I'm sort of impatient with it. So I'm trying to be very, very careful. I'm at that point where I can see what day I wrote this, and that section I wrote that day. It's sort of been like that. After it's rested I ll know more about it. My honest feelings are that it's pretty good. My hopes are that my publisher is satisfied with it, and promotes it well, and that will, of course, moves me into a more mainstream audience. I'm trying to move into a more mainstream audience without changing what I write really. To maybe make another audience aware of what I can do. I mean I love FREEZER BURN, and I'm always gonna write all kinds of novels, but FREEZER BURN isn't the novel that's gonna to get me into the mainstream. It's that side of me that's a little bit quirky... even impertinent... kind of the one who likes to.... I guess the same urges like the teenager who drives by and moons you.

Rohrig: Well, you do a lot of unexpected things...

Lansdale: Oh, I hope I never quit doing that.

Rohrig: You just mentioned TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD and Flannery O'Connor. These names plus Ardath Mayhar pop up everywhere I look. Do you see these women as having major influences in your writing?

Lansdale: I never thought about it being because they were women. That's interesting. I've never thought about that, but certainly they are three people who've had major influences in my writing. I'm also a big fan of say, John D. MacDonald, for example, and Dashiell Hammett and a lot of the usual suspects. Raymond Chandler. James Cain. His most famous books, DOUBLE INDEMNITY and THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE, have had a tremendous influence on the way I write. FREEZER BURN is like Flannery O Connor and James Cain. It has that element. But I don't know that they're an influence because they're women, but I think their influence is because they wrote good books.

Rohrig: I don't find that you write any fluffy female characters.

Lansdale: No. I didn't tend to grow up with a lot of fluffy females characters. You know like my mother was not a fluffy female character. The women that I've known really well, I'm trying to think... I've certainly known those kind of people, but the people who've had influence on my life, they may have been feminine in some ways. I don't know. That term can be so broad. They were certainly feminine, but they weren't shrinking violets or they weren't fluffy. They were always very independent minded and spoke their mind and had a colorful way of saying it. Brett, for example, is a character in the Hap and Leonard books, and I met that lady. Oh, she just happened to be somebody I met, but I remember. And said, I'm gonna use her as a character. So I sort of welded her with my wife and a couple of other people I knew, but (it was) the main way that she talked and all. She was a woman that I met on a book tour. In fact, she was the one that drove me around. She was colorful as hell! I said you know, I don't believe I've ever met anybody quite like this. I though she was just as interesting as she could be, so I worked her into that character.

Rohrig: When you deal with wives, you deal with very strong women -- the wife in COLD IN JULY, Beverly in WALTZ OF SHADOWS. In fact the scene where Hank and Beverly are attacked by Fat Boy and Snake... After that, it's really very tough. For a woman, I could really understand how Beverly felt as she came at Hank for not being the hero. On the other hand, I really felt for Hank as well. Okay, so that's not really a question. So the fan popped out of me, Joe. Sorry!

Lansdale: That's all right. I will say that about this. I think another reason that I was very quick to put that book aside was that I found that book very painful. I think it's very different with a reader. A reader spends two hours, fours hours, maybe six hours with a book, but a writer spends months with a book. And that particular book, for whatever reason -- because it was longer than it should have been, whatever. I spent ten months with that book, and it was a very dark book. It had its funny moments, a cheerful thing here and there, but it was a very, very dark book. I think when I thought back on it, especially that scene. It was a hard scene to write, almost didn't write it, but no, I said this is right. This is the book, this is the story, and I'm not going to flinch from the story. But I think it really left me in a dark place there for a while, and I really didn't like being there. Also. I have children, and the children in the book were reminiscent of my own children. Here I was putting my family in this very dark place in some ways. They were inspired by my family, certainly they were not my family and were different in many ways. But the fact is I was touching on elements of my own family to make the story work. And just I felt almost like one of those method actors who got too deep into the character.

Rohrig: It was kind of an abrupt end to WALTZ, but I don't know how else you would have ended it.

Lansdale: Well, you know, my feelings are about it, honestly, that I had said in the introduction that that particular version would never appear in print again. But what I really believe is that I would like to revise it slightly, and that I would give it an epilogue which I didn't have in the book. I think at the time it was a combination of things. I felt it was the right ending because I think that I had come to end of my rope as far as telling that story. And I just had been on that rope so long, and it had been on fire at one end and was burning toward me that when it got to the end, it was just burned out. I think now if I looked at it, I wouldn't go in and restructure everything, but I would make it a little better in places. I would probably explore a little here and there. Cut a little bit more in one spot, and on the end write out an epilogue. And some day I hope to do that.

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