Gabino Iglesias Reviews The Donut Legion by Joe R. Lansdale
The Donut Legion, Joe R. Lansdale (Mulholland 978-0-31654-068-1, $28.00, 304pp, hc) March 2023.
Author Joe R. Lansdale is one of the most entertaining storytellers working today, and he does it across a plethora of genres and styles. The Donut Legion, Lansdale’s latest, is a mystery novel wrapped in crime fiction and garnished with a dash of horror, a lot of snappy dialogue, and enough humor to almost overshadow the many timely topics the narrative delves into. At this point – and I’ve said this before in these same pages – Lansdale is his own genre, and this novel is teeming with all the elements readers have come to expect from the Mojo Master.
Charlie Garner gets an unexpected visit from his ex-wife Meg, but the visit ends with Meg uttering a strange warning before suddenly vanishing into thin air. The bizarre encounter leaves Charlie feeling unsettled, and he soon learns Meg has been missing for more than a week. When Charlie breaks into her place to check on her, he finds Meg’s and her new partner’s things all packed up in boxes. The property manager and neighbors think the couple ran away from bill collectors, but Charlie is convinced there’s something else going on, so he starts looking into it with the help of his brother Felix and his lawyer wife. Meg had been working at a local donut shop owned by the same people at the head of a weird cult everyone calls ‘‘the Saucer People,’’ a space-age religious group living in a compound and stockpiling guns while they wait for the extraterrestrial Second Coming. The cult’s dealings are even shadier than Charlie expected, and the more he looks into it and asks questions, the more he learns about the group’s strange, violent, and even murderous practices. With the help of Felix and a journalist nicknamed Scrappy, Charlie uncovers just how dark the cult is, and when people he spoke with die, he knows he needs to get to the bottom of things if he wants to rescue Meg.
The Donut Legion works on many levels. The dialogue is superb, the humor is relentless, and the pacing and action are outstanding. The core of the plot is a mix of mystery and thriller, but there’s a bit of horror, a touch of science fiction, and that bit of weirdness that Lansdale always brings to the table, most of which, in this case, comes from a chimpanzee on a leash that may or may not play a huge role in the way the cult dishes out justice. Having a few real cults here – Jim Jones, David Koresh, Heaven’s Gate, etc. – serves to show that while somewhat outlandish, the type of organization Lansdale depicts here is very plausible and its ideas aren’t much stranger than many we’ve seen in the past…and none of them ended well.
Despite the many elements this novel has going for it, the most important thing about it is that Lansdale delivers a scathing look at the insidious nature of cults and the way they tend to prey on people who have nothing left to lose or who have been waiting for someone to promise them something better than what they have. The novel also touches on politics and the current zeitgeist, always with a very balanced mix of humor and social commentary that never feels preachy.
Lansdale’s impressive body of work shares a few cohesive elements other than action, humor, and some genre elements; he is always exploring the human condition. I’m not going into a discussion of genre versus literary fiction; I’m only saying Lansdale loves to get weird, but he always does so with impeccable character development and adding a philosophical touch to everything he writes, and The Donut Legion is a master class in doing just that. This is a wild ride, and it’s one of Lansdale’s best, most entertaining standalone novels.
Gabino Iglesias is a writer, journalist, professor, and book reviewer living in Austin TX. He is the author of Zero Saints and Coyote Songs and the editor of Both Sides. His work has been nominated to the Bram Stoker and Locus Awards and won the Wonderland Book Award for Best Novel in 2019. His short stories have appeared in a plethora of anthologies and his non-fiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and CrimeReads. His work has been published in five languages, optioned for film, and praised by authors as diverse as Roxane Gay, David Joy, Jerry Stahl, and Meg Gardiner. His reviews appear regularly in places like NPR, Publishers Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Criminal Element, Mystery Tribune, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and other print and online venues. He’s been a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards twice and has judged the PANK Big Book Contest, the Splatterpunk Awards, and the Newfound Prose Prize. He teaches creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University’s online MFA program. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.
This review and more like it in the June 2023 issue of Locus.
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