The Magic Wagon (SIGNED)

Doubleday. Used; Good. Doubleday & Company, Garden City, NY, 1986. Hardcover. *Signed* First edition, first printing. EX-LIBRARY wih usual stamps, markings and pocket. Book is in good condition. Dust Jacket, Is in very good condition. Flat signed by Joe R. Lansdale.This entertaining novel is set in turn-of-the-20th-century eastern Texas, where crooked traveling medicine shows and aging gunslingers define the closing frontier. Narrator Buster Fogg's family is wiped out by a twister in an early sequence described with surreal verve. Buster hitches on with Billy Bob Daniels, a patent-medicine pusher and trick shooter who claims to be the illegitimate son of Wild Bill Hickock, joining an entourage consisting of a kindly ex-slave named Albert, and Rot Toe, the wrestling ape. Adventures on the road which include swiping the mummified remains of Billy Bob's "Pa" and swindling settlers with their concoction of watered-down whiskey stoke personal tensions that only aggravate troubles when their wagon rolls into Mud Creek and Billy Bob is called out by Texas Jack, a dime-novel desperado who, legend says, intimidated even Wild Bill. Lansdale's affection for the classic western is never in doubt, although he spends much of the novel skillfully deflating the romance of heroic reputations made as much by luck and exaggeration as by skill with a gun. The true charm of the story is in its telling which melds laconic humor, colorful colloquialisms, and outrageous figures of speech into a Twainesque tall tale. . 1986. EX-LIBRARY. HARDCOVER.