The Magic Wagon

About an hour before sunrise, mid-July, 1909, we came rolling into Mud Creek in the Magic Wagon—Billy Bob Daniels, Old Albert, Rot Toe the Wrestling Chimpanzee, the body in the box, and me.

THE MAGIC WAGON
JOE R. LANSDALE

Already renowned for his work in horror and “splatterpunk,” Lansdale (the Hap and Leonard series, Cold in July, Bubba Ho-Tep) helped cement the Weird Western genre as we know it with THE MAGIC WAGON and several other titles beginning in the 1980s and continuing more than 30 years later to this day.
First published in 1986, THE MAGIC WAGON tells the tall tales of narrator Buster Fogg and the group of traveling merchant marauders he takes up with after his family is killed by a tornado. Their adventures take them through dank caves, across the countryside, and into Mud Creek — an East Texas town that would have made Deadwood look like the Land of Oz.

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR THE MAGIC WAGON
— «The true charm of the story, though, is in its telling, which melds laconic humor, colorful colloquialisms and outrageous figures of speech into a Twainesque tall tale. This novel endures as a modern western classic.» — Publishers Weekly
— The Magic Wagon is "to the 1980s what True Grit was to its decade." — Dean R. Koontz
— «Part tall tale, part suspense story, part dark fantasy, The Magic Wagon is wholly unique and unfailingly SUCCESSFUL.» — Ed Gorman, Trails West
— “A delight.” — Books of the Southwest
— «An assortment of colorful, often humorous characters gives this insightful and gritty tale authenticity and a sense of wonder.” — Booklist
— “Pure escapist reading.” — The Antioch Review
— «This is a rare, wonderful book.” — Lewis Shiner, The Austin Chronicle
— «Joe R. Lansdale proves he can show his readers a good time—and leave them a little something to think about afterward.” — The New York Times Book Review

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joe R. Lansdale is the author of fifty novels and more than three hundred 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 at least thirty short-story collections, and he has edited or co-edited over a dozen anthologies.
Lansdale has received the Edgar Award, eleven 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.