The Donut Legion by Joe R. Lansdale Review

Charlie’s ex appears to him one night in a vision - and then he finds out both she and her new husband have disappeared under suspicious circumstances. Signs point towards the flying saucer cult they belonged to but the cult has quite the economical stranglehold on their small east Texas town and few people are willing to help Charlie’s inquiries. And the clock is ticking as the cultists prepare to join their space gods in the stars…

I’ve never read Joe R. Lansdale before and after reading The Donut Legion I’m not exactly enchanted with his style of storytelling to make me want to seek out more of it!

The premise of a flying saucer cult is a promising one but the reality of the novel is that it’s basically just a slow-moving and often dull crime investigation story. Lansdale may write well but his narrative is far from compelling. The main characters are forgettable and often annoying - the amount of times Charlie corrects characters that say the chimp is an ape and not a monkey was beyond belief. It wasn’t funny the first time and it wasn’t funny for the fiftieth time either.

Lansdale’s female characters have idiotic names like Cherry and Scrappy, like they’re pets, and his twee cutesiness gets worse as he describes Charlie and Scrappy’s sex via the alphabet - they did B, a bit of D, and finished on F, etc. Other characters’ names are just unimaginative and plain lazy. The villain is simply “Cowboy” - in a story set in Texas. Brilliant. One hillbilly character is called Cletus. Yeah, I watched The Simpsons too, Joe, like millions of others - try harder!

The occasional gruesome murder keeps things from becoming too tedious and the dialogue wasn’t bad - some of the encounters between Charlie, Felix and assorted thugs were tense - but too much nothing happens for my taste. I’d frequently finish a chapter and wonder what the point of it was - that’s how little relevance whole swathes of the book have. I wouldn’t say it was predictable but there are so few surprises in the story - the ones suspected to have been behind it, were - that it’s more underwhelming than anything. Even the final “twist” has an anticlimactic air to it.

I just wanted the boring slog to be over with long before the end. Maybe I got unlucky and picked one of this author’s lesser works but The Donut Legion was a really weak crime novel that I definitely wouldn’t recommend to anyone. My impression of Lansdale is as a poor man’s Elmore Leonard or even Carl Hiaasen - donut bother.