Joe Lansdale in the Austin Chronicle

Books: Sometimes Rumble, Sometimes Tumble: Joe Lansdale may be Texas' bloody answer to Mark Twain - The Austin Chronicle: "Joe Lansdale was 4 when his father bought him a puppy. The dog soon started digging in a flower bed across the creek from their home, so an irate neighbor cracked the dog across the head with a steel pipe and tossed the limp critter into the creek to die. His father heard the news and marched to the neighbor's house with young Joe tagging along behind. 'He hit him just as hard as he could and knocked him cold out,' Lansdale remembers. 'Then he threw the guy in the creek. My father found the dog, which was alive, and nursed it back to health. I was nearly 18 when that dog died.' That moment speaks volumes about the man and the writer Lansdale would become while staying ever close to his East Texas roots."