Savage Season by Joe R Landsdale

Savage Season by Joe R Lansdale

Joe R Lansdale’s Savage Season is a poorly written mess of a book with paper thin characterization.

This series came highly recommended to me so I was very disappointed by this book. The biggest issue I had was that nothing in this book rings particularly true. None of the characters feel like real people, rather they are laundry lists of characteristics: Hap Collins is a jaded child of the Sixties who spent time in jail for resisting the draft. He knows martial arts and works as a day laborer doing farm work. His best friend is Leonard Pine. He’s black and gay and surly. He also knows martial arts. All of which sounds good on paper but you can’t short cut character development by giving your characters interesting characteristics and Lansdale never manages to sell any of this.

Moving beyond the unconvincing characters, the rest of the book is a series of bad cliches and the ending is cringe worthy. I almost put the book down with one page to go, just out of spite.