Not bad batch of mostly really short stories. Reads like a Ramones album, if you don’t like the current song there’s a different one coming up in 2 minutes. These are mostly good to average with one real stinker, Fire Dog. ( )

Well... overall, I was entertained, but honestly, most of these stories just sort of gave me a "hmpf" when I finished them. They weren't bad, but they just didn't do it for me. I like Lansdale's western stuff, his straight horror stuff, and his Hap & Leonard stuff. The fantasy, or more slap-sticky horror items don't hit me like his other stuff. For me, the highlight of this collection is the last tale, "Master of Misery". It reappears in a different form in the H&L book "Captains Outrageous". Cool to see it in it's "original" form. ( )

Bumper Crop was a bit of a mixed bag. There were some stories that I really enjoyed, and some that were complete duds that I wanted to get past quickly, hoping that the next story would be better. In general and in this short story collection, Lansdale has a very easy going and pleasing style. I think he leans on a first person narrative a bit more than he should to my liking. Because of this easy going style, this collection was a breeze to get through. Mostly, the problem was that some of the stories were just out there, and I didn’t get.

My favorite story in the collection was the final one. Lansdale put to good use his extensive martial arts background in crafting a tightly written tale about a kickboxer going through hard times living in a tropical locale after he inadvertently killed a competitor in a kick boxing match. The villain in this story is a Muay Thai fighter, who is a complete and utter bastard, and treats his girlfriend absolutely horribly. He lures the story’s hero into a battle to the death—a fight that is completely unsanctioned with no witnesses other than the girlfriend. To add to the epicness of this confrontation, a massive tropical storm is about to hit the island. This had a great setup and a great climax.

Carl Alves - author of Battle of the Soul ( )

Confession time: I'm not a huge horror fan. Yes, I read the occasional short piece and keep up with the trends in the field, but when it comes to leisure time reading, I don't seek it out. The chills and thrill and outright scares don't push the same buttons in my reptilian hindbrain that they do in true fans of the genre. That said, it's time to pull up a chair as I tell you why you need to go out and buy Joe Lansdale's creep-fest collection, Bumper Crop.

I'm a great admirer of Lansdale's writing prowess. That, in a nutshell, is why I'm willing to read pretty much anything put out under his byline. And he writes some damn horrific stuff, things that I wouldn't go within a hundred miles of otherwise. But Lansdale has such a natural skill with the written word that I'm enraptured by the raw elegance of his storytelling down to the sentence level. He writes with such an unabashed confidence--treats the most hideous subjects with a reverent tenderness, shovels the most rancid cow pies with the straightest face--that there's almost no way a reader can't fall under his spell.

So what I'm basically saying here is that Bumper Crop is Lansdale's version of a Greatest Hits album, right? Wrong. High Cotton is his Greatest Hits. Top to bottom, it's a better book, with better stories. If you don't own it, you should track it down post-haste. What Bumper Crop amounts to is the literary equivalent of a Best Of record, gathering those popular album cuts and B-sides that weren't really hits, but have proven their popularity in workman-like fashion over the long haul. Taken together, the two books comprise a pretty definitive overview of Lansdale's short fiction career. ( )

It's hard to not enjoy a Lansdale novel. Or in this case a Lansdale collection of short stories. Everything he writes is extremely enjoyable. They are just pure fun and this is no exception. The collection contains twenty six excellent short stories with the only negative being that you've most likely read several of them elsewhere. I know that I did. Many of the stories are pretty short too. With twenty six stories and not even 200 pages and each story has one page of an author's note, you can see that some are really short. Even with all that and it not being a completely new collection, it still is a must read. My favorites of the bunch are listed below.

"The Man Who Dreamed" - An old man who sees the future does his best to improve it
"Pilots" (with Dan Lowry) - Two sets of life's victims do their best to adapt to regular life
"Listen" - A fun story of someone who is permanently ignored and forgotten
"Bestsellers Guaranteed" - How to write a best selling novel
"Master of Misery" - A man is pushed into a fight he does not want ( )