Joe R. Lansdale's Leather Maiden

Here's a top-notch read from the bookshelf: in a small east Texas town, a Gulf War vet and a missing woman collide in Leather Maiden, a crime thriller by world-champion storyteller Joe R. Lansdale.  
 
“There is no purpose to life…” the ultra-creepy, homicidal bad guy in Leather Maiden says.  “There is only chaos from which you can create purpose, and a game is as purposeful as you can get.  There is no real reason anyone feels for anyone other than the lie we tell ourselves.  The lie where we make importance out of the simplicity of emptiness.” 
 
That the speaker’s game includes torture, mutilation, and murder should not lead us to the simplistic conclusion that he’s wrong about life’s purposelessness.   Indeed, one of Joe Lansdale’s good guys here, a self-described “goddamn sociopath” named Booger, agrees with the villain: “He makes sense,” he says.  “It’s true.”  Even Cason Statler, Booger’s friend and the book’s protagonist, isn't too sure. 
 
I suspect that uncertainty is not only the keynote in Leather Maiden—it’s one of the main features of Lansdale’s fictional world.  The sense that chaos reigns and that whatever we do for—or to—one another doesn't really matter is balanced against the determination to give a shit anyway.  The challenge, of course, is that in a world of brutal violence, giving a shit sometimes means meeting force with force.  And when that happens, how do we separate the sheep from the goats–or the Boogers—from the bad guys? 
 
Just like the real world, Lansdale doesn't give us any pat answers for that.  Instead, he serves up the question, hot and fresh and full of urgency.   Lansdale never flinches, and we owe him for that.