A review by ombraluce
Things Get Ugly: The Best Crime Fiction of Joe R. Lansdale by Joe R. Lansdale

4.0

Lansdale is an incredible storyteller, capable of taking the most mundane topic, the most flimsy cue, and turning it into a story that one wishes would never end. The short stories in this collection, almost all of which have been rescued from various anthologies and magazines, and thus already published in the past, are all crime stories in various ways, and have one thing in common: the events are at first simple, almost boring, everyday affairs, and then, as the title says, 'things get ugly', sometimes in a surreal way. As in all collections, something is above average, something is below average, but the overall level is stratospheric.