The Bottoms

"Joe Lansdale is an author that I came to later on, but he’s become one of my favourite writers. I love all of his books, and The Bottoms is one of my favourite books of all time. A lot of his work is set in East Texas, which is bayou country. It’s marshy and very remote. The first season of True Detective is similar for anyone who has seen that. True Detective is set across the border in Louisiana, but it’s the same kind of world. And I think Lansdale does a really good job of playing with that atmosphere. The Bottoms is about a boy in 1933 who finds the mutilated body of a black woman, dead, strung up to a tree—so a lot of the book is looking at race during that time period through the eyes of a young boy. So there’s a strong setting, and an almost mythological storyline. Because when you’re living in an environment that’s very remote, people create their own stories that get passed down for generations, and Lansdale does a good job of trying to understand the people who lived there during that period. I can’t recommend The Bottoms more. Seeing it all from the boy’s viewpoint is a way of making it very shocking and confronting. I think when you talk about a subject like race, it can be trickier to navigate from an adult’s point of view, because an adult comes with a lot of baggage; I think it can be more eye opening to see the absurdities of how people are treated when you look at it from the perspective of a child witnessing these things for the first time, to look at it with fresh eyes."