The Complete Drive-In Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  OTHER BOOKS BY JOE R. LANSDALE

  Dedication

  A “B” MOVIE NIGHT WITH POPCORN AND WATER MOCCASINS

  BOOK ONE - THE DRIVE-IN

  INTRODUCTION

  FADE-IN PROLOGUE

  PART ONE - THE ALL NIGHT HORROR SHOW

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  PART TWO - THE POPCORN KING

  1

  2

  3

  4

  PART THREE - THE ORBIT MUST DIE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  EPILOGUE

  BOOK TWO - THE DRIVE-IN

  INTRODUCTION

  FADE-IN PROLOGUE

  SHOWTIME - FIRST REEL

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  SECOND REEL

  1

  2

  3

  4

  THIRD REEL

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  FOURTH REEL

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  FIFTH REEL

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  EPILOGUE

  BOOK THREE - THE DRIVE-IN

  INTRODUCTION

  FADE-IN PROLOGUE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  THE THIRD FEATURE BEGINS

  PART ONE - TRUCKIN‘, BABY

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  PART TWO

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  PART THREE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  INTERMISSION

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  PART FOUR

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  PART FIVE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  EPILOGUE

  Copyright Page

  PRAISE FOR THE DRIVE-IN

  “It’s sort of Hunter S. Thompson meets Stephen King. Fear and Loathing at the Drive-in.”—Mystery Scene, Charles de Lint

  “Anything with this guy’s name on the cover is most definitely worth your time ... this is one writer who demands greater acclaim.”—Fangoria, Stanley Wiater

  “The Drive-in serves as a great introduction for those unfamiliar with Lansdale. It is abounding with the outlandish charm and style that is uniquely his own.”—Sun-Sentinel, Michael Sellard

  “Joe R. Lansdale’s Drive-in novels make for a classic American trilogy. If your Americans happen to be George A. Romero, Roger Corman, and Stuart Gordon.”—Rick Klaw

  “This is what a Twilight Zone episode directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis might have been like.”—Thrust, Howard Coleman.

  “The Drive-in has that rare combination: fear and laughter. It is a quick read that will have readers alternately chuckling and shivering. And as one must expect from Lansdale, it is utterly tasteless.”—Rocky Mountain News, Mark Graham

  “It’s a gross, funny, fascinating book.”—The New York Review of Science Fiction, George Alec Effinger

  “For the uninitiated there is only one piece of advice that needs to be heeded with regard to The Drive-in [novels]: READ THEM NOW! Brilliant in vision and scope ...”—The Cabinet of Dr. Casey, Tony Gangi

  “A horror novel for the Roger Corman crowd, a Troma film for the literate, that was nevertheless nominated for both the Bram Stoker and World Fantasy Awards.”—Green Man Review

  “This is bold stuff, not for the squeamish, and it rivals the work of Stephen King on The Stand in the scope of its visionary, apocalyptic nature. It’s horror on an epic scale ... with a measured East Texas drawl.”—David Rosiak

  OTHER BOOKS BY JOE R. LANSDALE

  Hap Collins and Leonard Pine mysteries

  Savage Season

  Mucho Mojo

  Two-Bear Mambo

  Bad Chili

  Rumble Tumble

  Veil’s Visit

  Captains Outrageous

  Vanilla Ride

  The Drive-In series

  The Drive-In: A “B” Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas

  The Drive-In 2: Not Just One of Them Sequels

  The Drive-In: A Double-Feature

  The Drive-In: The Bus Tour

  The Ned the Seal trilogy

  Zeppelins West

  Flaming London

  The Sky Done Ripped

  Other novels

  Act of Love

  Texas Night Riders

  Dead in the West

  Magic Wagon

  The Nightrunners

  Cold in July

  Tarzan: the Lost Adventure

  The Boar

  Freezer Burn

  Waltz of Shadows

  Something Lumber This Way Comes

  The Big Blow

  Blood Dance

  The Bottoms

  A Fine Dark Line

  Sunset and Sawdust

  Lost Echoes

  Leather Maiden

  The Drive-in novels had their own original dedications, including

  dedications to the drive-in theaters, now gone, that inspired them.

  For this new edition, however, I have a new dedication,

  and, ladies and gentlemen, this is it:

  This is for my son, Keith Lansdale, of whom I am intensely proud.

  A “B” MOVIE NIGHT WITH POPCORN AND WATER MOCCASINS

  by Don Coscarelli

  It all started with an afternoon trip to my local horror bookshop in Sherman Oaks, California. It was a cool little place called Dangerous Visions which, unfortunately, is now long gone. I was chatting up the guy behind the counter and casually asked him what was new and cutting edge in horror. He said, “Follow me.” He led me to the back of the store, to the “L” fiction aisle. “Joe Lansdale,” he said, and stuck a paperback in my hand. (I think it was The Nightrunners.) “Good storyteller,” he said, and, as I read over the back cover, he followed up with, “Joe Lansdale always has a high body count.”

  Well, I went home with that copy of The Nightrunners and one other book, something called The Drive-in. I don’t know exactly why I immediately gravitated to The Drive-in as the first one to read. Was it that subtitle on the cover, “A B-Movie with Blood and Popcorn Made in Texas”? Probably.

  I dove right in to the horror, humor, and overall freaky audacity that was, and still is, The Drive-in. Joe writes his books like movies, he sets up the bizarre scenes, populates them with memorable characters, and then lets them talk in that amazing Nacogdoches dialect of his. Then Joe cranks up the suspense, action, and humor. Another amazing talent Joe has is a phenomenal abil ity to mix up genres. In The Drive-i
n, he got me started with what seemed like a traditional coming-of-age story, then effortlessly moved into post-apocalyptic survival and finally an out-and-out horror monster tale! I was halfway through the book when I realized this will make for a frickin’ fantastic movie!

  I have a friend named Jeff Conner who was once the publisher of that terrific, and now-extinct, small publisher Scream Press. Since Jeff was the only person I knew in the publishing business, I asked him to track down Joe’s phone number for me. Jeff immediately began working his contacts and got me Joe’s home phone number. I called Joe up and got him on the phone.

  The first thing I noticed in that call was that Joe speaks in this amazing East Texas accent. It’s a lingo that is really unique, strange (to me), and wonderful. For the first few moments of our conversation I was so taken with his language that I wasn’t really responding. Joe inquired politely if I was still on the line, so I got right to the reason I had called. I told him I was a fan and wanted to make his book The Drive-in into a movie. Joe was very nice, but told me there were a couple other people interested and gave me his agent’s contact information.

  I then did two things. The second thing I did was to call up Joe’s agent and make my pitch. But the first thing was a bit unconventional. I hired a brilliant Russian-born illustrator, Nikita Knatz, to help me visually conceptualize what a movie of The Drive-in might look like. Nikita had done some epic visualizations for me on my film The Beastmaster. Nikita had a knack for the weird and strange and I commissioned him to do a series of illustrations of The Drive-in world. I probably should have waited to secure the movie rights but back then I was a guy in a hurry. Imagine my surprise a couple months later when I learned that Joe’s agent had optioned the rights to somebody else! Nikita had just finished his work and it was immediately destined to go into my file cabinet for the next couple of decades.

  Later I called Joe up, still despondent over the loss of The Drive-in movie rights. Joe’s response was to invite me down to Texas. He was certain that once we met in person we’d be able to cook up something for us to work on together.

  About a month later I arrived in Houston and took the two-hour drive north to Lansdale country. Anyone who gets to know Joe Lansdale knows that his hometown of Nacogdoches informs his entire being. This small town and its residents have had a tremendous influence on him and his work. As he showed me around, Joe told me how Nacogdoches was the first town in Texas and that later it was the last stop on the vaudeville circuit for legendary comedians like Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers. As it is just a few miles from the Louisiana border, Nacogdoches has a distinct Deep South conservative sensibility, yet Joe is one of the most progressive guys you’ll ever meet. Joe happens to be a martial arts master and, coincidentally, the few other liberal-minded citizens of the town all happen to be martial arts experts also. I hear they all like to hang out at Joe’s martial arts studio and are happy to talk politics with their right-wing neighbors as long as it’s in the dojo and on the mat in the event discussions get hot.

  In addition to the tour of Nacogdoches and meeting the entire Lansdale family, including Joe’s terrific wife Karen and their two adorable kids, Keith and Kasey, I had the distinct honor of attending a “B-movie night with popcorn” in Joe’s den. Later I was to learn that the movie night with popcorn was a coveted invitation and a notorious rite of passage for many of Joe’s author friends. It’s a little known secret that many of Joe’s greatest writerly inspirations came to him in the middle of the night after watching a B-movie and eating the special Nacogdoches popcorn.

  The VCR cranked up and Killer Klowns from Outer Space started to play. Karen was in the kitchen getting the popcorn popping. During a lull in the Klown action, I looked over my shoulder into the kitchen and saw Karen preparing the popper. She had hold of an ice cream scooper and put several large scoops of what looked to me like vanilla ice cream into the popcorn kettle. I’m thinking to myself, “Now that’s a novel way to cook up popcorn—with an ice cream flavor.”

  A few minutes later Karen came into the den and presented each of us with a monster bowl of the famous popcorn. It was fantastic! I started wolfing the stuff down as Joe told me how he got inspiration for his stories from eating the popcorn, watching the B-movies, and then enduring the fever-induced dreams those two things created in him. I was a bit skeptical that popcorn and B-movies would create a peyote-like experience, but what the hell, I still ate two full bowls of the stuff. I then asked Karen where she got the idea of putting ice cream into the popcorn. It wasn’t ice cream, she informed me, they made their popcorn the old-fashioned way, with scoops of lard! No wonder it tasted so good! But if I’d known the key ingredient, I would have paced myself a bit and not quaffed it down whole hog, so to speak. The rest of the movie was a hallucinatory blur as the popcorn rumbled its way through my digestive system. It was definitely having an effect as I started hearing a ringing in my ears and the Killer Klowns were actually terrifying to me.

  After the movie ended I shakily followed Joe downstairs and across the yard to his office where I would be bunking for the night. I was going to be sleeping in the same bed that such literary luminaries and friends of Joe’s had slept in, including Lewis Shiner, Richard Christian Matheson, and David Schow. I was wondering if those gents had eaten the popcorn too and what kind of effect it had on them.

  As we moved through his yard in the dark, Joe warned me to watch out for the water moccasins that would slither up from the creek at night. He said something about pitying the poor fool who would step on one of those poisonous critters. I was sweating profusely and my eyes were darting around looking for water moccasins in every shadow.

  I fell into the bed and spent the rest of the night in a popcorn-induced fever dream chock full of water moccasins. Every half hour I’d wake to see shadows on the blanket and would flail at them, trying to get the snakes off my bed. I was dreaming of water moccasins on the bed, under the bed, on the floor, in my shoes. Flying moccasins, swimming moccasins, you get the picture. If I were Joe, I would have jumped up the next morning and put those visions to paper in the form of an audacious short story.

  A few years later I heard that, due to an interest in a better diet, Karen would not al low Joe to eat the popcorn anymore. I will leave it to the biographers and literary researchers to one day go back and analyze Joe’s body of work “pre-popcorn” and “post-popcorn” to see if there is any difference. Sometimes I wonder if Joe just made that whole story up. He is a terrific storyteller and how could an author like Joe pass up one about magic popcorn that, combined with B-movies, generates strange stories in a writer’s mind? Stories like The Drive-in, contained herein, where the protagonists are literally torn to shreds by “The Popcorn King.”

  I’ve been back to Nacogdoches a couple times since then but never slept at Joe’s again, never watched B-movies with him again, and never, but never, allowed myself to eat any of that Lansdale popcorn. I guess I am a witness that Joe’s claims may be true. For me, there is no question that the trip to Nacogdoches and the B-movies with popcorn were a source of hallucinatory night-sweats and nightmares. Unlike Joe, I was just too lazy to put it down on paper, until now.

  BOOK ONE

  THE DRIVE-IN

  A B-Movie with Blood and Popcorn, Made in Texas

  INTRODUCTION

  Back in the eighties I kept having this dream.

  Every night, as soon as I drifted off I found myself at a giant drive-in theater. I could tell, even though I was dreaming, that I was putting together all the drive-ins I had ever attended and was combining true experiences with dream experiences.

  The dream got weirder. It was like a movie serial. Every night I was excited because I got to see what happened next. What happened in the dream was I was with some friends, and we got trapped in the drive-in by a big black acidic blob that surrounded it and we couldn’t get out. Contained in the drive-in without food and rules, people turned to murder and cannibalism and not washing their hands after
peeing.

  Anyway, the dream stayed with me, night after night, even though it got to a point where it was no longer advancing; it started repeating itself. I was on a weird drive-in loop.

  Then I got a call from T. E. D. Klein at Twilight Zone. He asked if I would write a non-fiction piece for the magazine. They had run other articles by other writers, and they wondered if I had something. I don’t know why I was chosen. Maybe it was because I had sold them a few stories and Ted—as he was known to most, not T. E. D., even though that was his writer tag—got along with me pretty well, and we had had a number of conversations. On the other hand, maybe I was the last pick in the bag. I don’t know.