“A Garbage Man with a Gun”
The first time Billy Summers killed a man, he was barely twelve. By the time he’s eighteen, he’s a sniper with the Marines in Iraq, where he notches up another two dozen kills. Instead of re-upping, he tries to find work back in the States. One of his former Marine friends asks him to kill someone. Thus begins Billy’s career as an elite hitman. His only condition is that his victims have to be demonstrably bad men. He’s not a sociopath driven to kill — he’s just good with a gun. He can hit targets from an incredible distance and then vanish like Houdini without being identified or caught. Now, at the ripe old age of 44, he’s looking to retire. One last job and he’s done.Continue Reading
After decades of cranking out high-caliber, genre-smashing literature, and with a badass martial arts pedigree to boot, it’s remarkable that no one tackled a documentary about East Texas’ reigning champion of mojo storytelling, Joe R. Lansdale. Along came intrepid New York City filmmaker Hansi Oppenheimer, a self-described fangrrrl who grabbed her camera and jetted to the source, joining Lansdale in his hometown Nacogdoches, Texas, to film All Hail the Popcorn King. It was a journey — what Lansdale’s rabid fans might call a pilgrimage — to East Texas, the site where the local color echoes through Lansdale’s masterful tales of blue-collar anti-heroes, two-bit criminals, and voracious monsters lurking in raucous honky-tonks, musty movie houses, and swampy bottom lands frequented by their fictionalized counterparts. Through her lens, Oppenheimer grants us an intimate visit with our favorite raconteur, inviting us into the oldest town in Texas, and the place Lansdale calls home.
