I loved that book, I'm not afraid to say it, but I loved it for reasons that are entirely subjective. Lansdale, in MUCHO MOJO uses the friendship between Hap and Leonard to go into things that go way beyond his storyline. A deep emotional range will give me reasons to like your characters and even more reasons to like your book. If everything is always dark and sad, I'll feel you're trying to pry an emotion from me. A deep emotional range? That's a tricky one and not many writers aside from Joe Lansdale do correctly.

MUCHO MOJO has a thick, suffocating atmosphere. Your book could be about someone doing his groceries, as long as he's doing them in a concrete wasteland, that the neon lights are throbbing and that creepy bystanders are ogling him, I'm going to read it and like it. A heavy atmosphere? It's the name of the game for me. A slow pace? I love when things don't cascade down the page. When I say I'm trying to be rational here, you have to know that I like my fiction to have precise things. Lansdale doesn't treat death as a commodity and ironically, that contributes in making is novels feel more alive than most. Lansdale examines mortality through the existential questioning of Leonard and through the grim observations of Hap and because of that, every death that occurs through MUCHO MOJO weights heavier and heavier. With these two variables, Lansdale is already cheating the classic trope of tough guy novels where death is handled like candy. Hap and Leonard are both confronted to a tragic death (Uncle Chester) and to the frailty of life (support character MeMaw). It's part of what makes MUCHO MOJO so strong. One thing I will address though is the theme of mortality. I'm not even mad about it, because that will leave you at least two dozens of things to discover I can't even get into here. I gave you a pretty exhaustive synopsis of what was going on, but it's impossible to give it to you completely and that's what makes a Joe Lansdale novel what it is.

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