“Joe R. Lansdale has a folklorist’s eye for telling detail and a frontporch raconteur’s sense of pace.” — The New York Times Book Review “One of the greatest yarn spinners of his generation: fearless, earthy, original, manic and dreadfully funny.” — The Dallas Morning News “Funny, scary, heartwarming, heart-pounding, Tom

“The narrative builds an atmosphere of impending doom in the lives of a group of blithely unsuspecting denizens during the four days preceding the 1900 Galveston hurricane, considered by many as the most devastating North American natural disaster of the 20th century…. Despite the bare-knuckle prose, there is a heavy

Chapter One: Bill Roberts decided to rob the firecracker stand on account he didn’t have a job and not a nickel’s worth of money and his mother was dead and kind of freeze-dried in her bedroom. Well, not completely freeze-dried. Actually, she stunk, but she seemed to be holding her