Review: Bubba and the Cosmic Blood-Suckers

Bubba and the Cosmic Blood-Suckers by Joe R. Lansdale
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I received an advance copy of this from NetGalley for review.

Elvis and horror go together like a peanut butter-n-banana sandwich. Which is to say that it catches your attention, but it might not be something you’d want to make a regular part of your diet.

This is a prequel story to Lansdale’s Bubba Ho-Tep in which we learned that the rumors about Elvis faking his death were true, and that he was living out his final days in a shitty nursing home where he gets into a scrap with a mummy. Here we’ve got The King and one his minions, a bodyguard/hanger-on named Johnny Smack, who secretly fight evil supernatural beings under the command of Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker. The Colonel pulls Elvis away from his Las Vegas shows to go on a mission to New Orleans where interdimensional vampires have been turning people into living basketballs while draining away their essence. Several other monster fighters are brought in to help vanquish them, and they all soon fight themselves in a terrifying fight for their lives.

It’s a real mixed bag here with Lansdale doing some genuinely creepy horror of a kind I haven’t read from him in a while, and the idea that Elvis led this double life as a fighter against the evil is kinda enjoyable. My favorite part involved Elvis and his crew trying to hold off the bad guys by going Alamo in a house protected by magic and a horny ghost, and there’s another good bit that involves taking a pink Cadillac into another dimension which is wonky fun. However, a lot of time is spent trying to explain how the guy who became a fat jump-suited pill-addicted joke about this time was actually a tormented bad ass. If you’re going to do a book like this then I get that Lansdale has to pump Elvis up into more than a handsome guy with a great voice and sex appeal who eventually became a victim of his own success into something more substantial, but it just didn’t work for me.

I also really liked both the original story and movie adaptation of Bubba Ho-Tep which played more into the idea of a ‘realistic’ older and faded Elvis who doesn’t know anything about monsters looking back at his life with regret and making one last stand to reclaim some of his old glory and dignity. This undercuts that idea with the revised history although Lansdale makes a mighty attempt of stitching it together into a retconned timeline.

This also has one of my pet peeves of an author putting a bunch of similar looking names together with Elvis’ team consisting of Johnny, John Henry, Jack, and Jenny so apparently this book was sponsored by the letter ‘J’. It’s extra aggravating when you’re reading a poorly formatted advanced e-version that has turned much of the text into word salad and makes it even more confusing.

As a Lansdale fan who got it for free I enjoyed it well enough, but it looks like this is going to be originally released as another one of his collector’s edition hardback, and the current price on Amazon is $40 for 200 pages. That’s way too much money both the quantity and quality of story you’d get for the price.

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