Savage Season: A Hap and Leonard Novel (1) (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard) [Paperback]

Joe R. Lansdale (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 6, 2009 | Series: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard

A rip-roaring, high-octane, Texas-sized thriller, featuring two friends, one vixen, a crew of washed-up radicals, loads of money, and bloody mayhem.Hap Collins and Leonard Pine are best friends, yet they couldn't be more different. Hap is an east Texas white-boy with a weakness for Texas women. Leonard is a gay, black Vietnam vet. Together, they steer up more commotion than a fire storm. But that's just the way they like it. So when an ex-flame of Hap's returns promising a huge score. Hap lets Leonard in on the scam, and that's when things get interesting. Chockfull of action and laughs, Savage Season is the masterpiece of dark suspense that introduced Hap and Leonard to the thriller scene. It hasn't been the same since.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Start with two best friends who practice martial arts in their free time: one a straight white guy, the other a black gay guy. Add a conniving ex-wife in a blue-jean miniskirt. Throw in half a million in a muddy creekbed somewhere near the Sabine River in East Texas. Add an ex-radical from the '60s and two naive idealists who want to save the world. Mix them all together in a half-assed plan, season with double-crosses, and then top it off with a hilarious and chilling drug dealer named Soldier. Bloody mayhem a la Lansdale. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Hap and Leonard put in long days of work for little reward. When Hap's old girlfriend Trudy struts in with a plan to make some serious money, Hap and Leonard cautiously get involved. Just as the money is acquired, Hap and Leonard quickly lose control of the situation. To survive, they need to rely upon each other and use their well-honed fighting skills against a ruthless madman. Phil Gigante's performance is mesmerizing: he infuses this book with attitude and style, imbuing each character with a rich distinct voice that resonates well with each personality. His narration is crisp and smooth, with a good distribution of tension according to the given scene. His sole weakness is that sometimes his character voices carry over into the narration causing momentary confusion for listeners. A Vintage paperback. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Audio CD edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; Reprint edition (January 6, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307455386
• ISBN-13: 978-0307455383
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.5 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #495,587 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty novels and numerous short stories. His work has appeared in national anthologies, magazines, and collections, as well as numerous foreign publications. He has written for comics, television, film, newspapers, and Internet sites. His work has been collected in eighteen short-story collections, and he has edited or co-edited over a dozen anthologies. He has received the Edgar Award, eight Bram Stoker Awards, the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Grinzani Cavour Prize for Literature, the Herodotus Historical Fiction Award, the Inkpot Award for Contributions to Science Fiction and Fantasy, and many others. His novella Bubba Hotep was adapted to film by Don Coscarelli, starring Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis. His story "Incident On and Off a Mountain Road" was adapted to film for Showtime's "Masters of Horror." He is currently co-producing several films, among them The Bottoms, based on his Edgar Award-winning novel, with Bill Paxton and Brad Wyman, and The Drive-In, with Greg Nicotero. He is Writer In Residence at Stephen F. Austin State University, and is the founder of the martial arts system Shen Chuan: Martial Science and its affiliate, Shen Chuan Family System. He is a member of both the United States and International Martial Arts Halls of Fame. He lives in Nacogdoches, Texas with his wife, dog, and two cats.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Repeat after me: "Hap and Leonard kick [...], October 28, 2001

By 

Church of The Flaming Sword - See all my reviews

This review is from: Savage Season (Paperback)

The author I've read the most is Stephen King at 17 books to date. Joe R. Lansdale is second with 10. Those numbers might not be impressive, but I try to read a little from a lot of different authors. Anyway, books like SAVAGE SEASON - or anything with Hap and Leonard - are why I like Lansdale's writing so much.

For those of you that don't know, SAVAGE SEASON is the novel that introduces Hap Collins, a straight white liberal ex-con, and Leonard Pine, a humorously cocky black homosexual Vietnam veteran. Hap and Leonard catch news that a hundred grand is deep down in an East Texas river. Joining the hunt are three Sixties radicals. One of these radicals is Hap's ex-wife Trudy. Hap and Leonard are soon doublecrossed by the radicals, who still haven't given up their dreams of revolution. The radicals, along with Hap and Leonard, are betrayed by one of their own to a far worse criminal.

This novel like a lot of Lansdale's work is violent, raunchy, funny, and not written to appease political correctness factions. Though the later Hap and Leonard novels like BAD CHILI and MUCHO MOJO are a bit more colorful, SAVAGE SEASON is the best place to start for the uninitiated.

LONG LIVE HAP AND LEONARD!!!

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Warmly recommended, February 8, 2003

By 

Cornelius Driessen (Spain) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Savage Season (Paperback)

The first in an amazing series involving Hap Collins and Leonard Pine, two most unlikely heroes (though heroes they are). The author performs a powerful magic that transforms a tale with a violent twist about characters that are theoretically undesireable into something unique and hard to put down or forget. Furthermore, should you never laugh out loud when reading this and don't feel moved to buy one of the other Hap & Leonard books I'll be surprised. The story, set in East Texas, is about a treasure hunt, Hap's old girl and much more. Caveat: this is perhaps the weakest of the series - it still rates 5 stars.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars THE PERFECT INTRODUCTION TO A FANTASTIC SERIES!!!, September 17, 2001

By 

Wayne C. Rogers (Las Vegas, Nevada United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Savage Season (Paperback)

SAVAGE SEASON by Joe R. Lansdale is the first novel in the "Hap Collins/Leonard Pine" series and clearly demonstrates the path to be taken by these utterly outrageous, yet definably noble characters. As the novel starts out, Hap and Leonard are doing okay. They have steady jobs in the rose fields and are taking a day off to shoot some skeet in the field behind Hap's house. Yep, everything is going pretty good until trouble walks around the corner of the house in the form of Trudy (Hap's ex-wife). Now, I don't know if Mr. Lansdale ever met my ex-girlfriend, but his description of Trudy fits her like a tight pair of spandex pants. Every time Trudy steps back into Hap's life and then leaves him again, it takes several months for him to recover. Needless to say, Leonard hates this lady for the way she treats his best friend. Anyway, Trudy has what appears to be a sweet deal for her loving ex-husband. It seems that one of her other ex-husbands, Howard, was in jail with a man who'd helped to rob a bank of one million dollars. All of the bank robber's cohorts were killed during or after the crime, and he almost bought the farm himself when he crashed his getaway boat into a submerged tree stump somewhere along the Sabine River. The money was never recovered, and the bank robber got life in prison. He gave Howard a general location of where he thought the sunken boat might be, hoping that if Howard were able to find the money, he'd share some of it with him to make his stay in prison a little easier. Since Hap knows the Sabine River like the back of his hand (well, maybe not quite that good), Trudy enlists Hap's help in locating the boat, offering him $200,000.00 for his services. Knowing Trudy as well as he does, Hap immediately gets Leonard to join in so that they can watch each other's backs. It isn't long before our East Texan duo find themselves caught in the middle of a betrayal that surprises neither one of them. The only real question is whether or not they will live long enough to see who actually ends up with the money. SAVAGE SEASON, though not as long or rich in detail as the other novels in the series, is still a fun, fast-paced read. The bantering and interaction between Hap and Leonard is what hooks you into this fantastic series. These two characters come alive in ways that other authors should take a look at. There's a lot to be learned here. Also, this novel offers a good deal of background information on both Hap and Leonard. This is stuff I didn't know because I started reading the series from the middle, then worked forward, and finally finished with the first novel, when I should've started with it to begin with. This sounds like something Hap and Leonard would do. Anyway, I enjoyed finding out why Hap had gone to prison as a young adult, how Trudy came into his life (she's referred to in a number of the other books), how he and Leonard met, and Leonard's background as a Vietnam vet. This information filled in a lot of blanks for me. For me, Mr. Lansdale's prose was smoothly written, offering a glimpse of how he would later develop into the author that he is today. All in all, this was an excellent read for me, and I was sorry to have the story end. I can't thank Joe R. Lansdale enough for this fabulous series. I only wish that he could write a "Hap/Leonard" book every year, while also doing his stand-alone novels. I hope that one of the novels in this series will eventually be done as a movie with Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson in the roles of Hap and Leonard. That would be the dessert after a delicious three-course meal!!