The end of the 1980s. Drive-in movie culture is mostly dead with one significant exception: THE ORBIT DRIVE-IN. A drive-in theater so large it houses multiple stories-high screens that fill the sky, and can hold four thousand cars and all the people who can squeeze in them. It’s a lit city that fills to the brim on Friday nights, crowds gather for the Dusk-to-Dawn Horror Shows. Horns honk, BBQ grills sizzle, people yell and act the fool, ready for the marathon of one low-budget horror film after another. But then suddenly the world changes in front of their eyes, not on the screens.

A comet, red and smiling with jagged teeth, flashes across the sky. People try to leave but find they are trapped by some acidic goo surrounding the entire drive-in. They grow hungry, homicidal and suicidal. Then along comes the Popcorn King, a jiving, rhyming creature formed by blue-white lightning, with four arms and a popcorn bucket on its head. A monster as strange and dangerous and mesmerizing as the creatures and villains on the screens. It offers the starving masses food, but there’s always a price to pay for survival.

And THEN things start to get wicked… It seems like with the dozens of books to his name, Joe R. Lansdale is perhaps best known for his Hap & Leonard series (which I’m hoping to start very soon!), and The Drive-in. The Drive-in was actually the second Lansdale book I had ever even heard of. A really good friend of mine recommended Paradise Sky to me around four or five years ago. I read it, loved it, and it remains my favorite Lansdale book. The other book my friend was trying to get me to read was The Drive-in.

But it was IMPOSSIBLE to find. Out of print, insanely expensive to buy a used copy through Amazon, and I had no luck finding it “in the wild,” though I looked for it anytime I was used book shopping. Flash forward a few more years, and a different friend (who has this uncanny ninja ability to find unfindable books) sent me this omnibus edition of all three Drive-in books!!

I’m not going into this review with anything approaching a strategy, so…yeah. I read all three of these straight through, but I’m going to sort’ve review it as one book…maybe. Well…no.

I don’t know. WE’LL JUST SEE WHAT HAPPENS, OK?!!?

The Drive-in starts off in a way that will feel pretty familiar to anyone who has read some of Lansdale’s books. It has that coming-of-age feel that a lot of his books have. We meet a group of teenage boys, Jack & Bob & Randy & Willard.

They hang out, shoot pool, talk about girls & movies, and just generally “yuk it up.” Going to the Orbit drive-in is part of their weekend ritual. The Orbit is this massive place with six huge screens, and they show horror movies on Friday, from dusk until dawn.

The boys make their way to the drive-in, but at some point during the night, things go…a little bonkers. Well, fully bonkers, to be honest. A huge-ass comet (with teeth) sails across the sky, trapping all the drive-in patrons inside the place with a barrier made of gnarly black goo that dissolves your flesh if you try crossing it.

And that kicks off what amounts to a post-apocalyptic story, which I didn’t completely expect. Shit gets grim. There’s violence & suicides & cannibalism & The Popcorn King, and just all manner of fucking craziness. Folks settle in to watch the same horror movies, over and over and over again, eating concession food and slowly going insane. The Drive-in goes to some very dark places, but like everything Lansdale writes, it’s also filled with a ton of humor.

There’s a lot of great insight into these books in the introductions to each, and one of the things I found most fascinating was how Lansdale described the process of writing the first two books as somewhat unpleasant & difficult. The third book, written many years after the second, he describes as easier & more fun to write.

And in a way, you can kind of feel those sentiments in the books. The first book is wildly ambitious, full of varied & nuanced characters, and for as fun as it can feel, it’s also got a very bleak side. To me, the second book felt like the weakest of the three, while still adding a lot to the Drive-in world & introducing a key character. And then the third book is just completely fucking bananas…the writing is considerably stronger, the humor is pitch-black, and goddamn…it’s just deeply, deeply weird. Like, this whole trilogy is a fucking journey, and one that surprised the hell out of me on more than a few occasions.

The Drive-in absolutely deserves its cult classic status. There were a few horror authors on Twitter recently listing their top ten horror novels, and many of them had The Drive-in near the top of their lists. I can’t even imagine what it would’ve been like to read this back when it came out, and it for sure seems like the kind of book that would’ve inspired countless aspiring authors.

I’m still at the bottom of the pile looking up in terms of the amount of Joe R. Lansdale’s books I plan on reading, but there’s no doubt at all he’s one of my top five favorite authors. Some of his books are a bit of a mash-up of different genres, but none more so than The Drive-in. You’d ultimately shelve this with horror, but there’s a whole lot more going on here. These books were clearly born of a love for all-things-horror, and things play out like absolute best B-movie you never saw.

The Drive-in is a dark, twisted, demented delight, and I’m so glad to have finally read it!