Jane Goes North by Joe R. Lansdale

Published by Subterranean Press on March 30, 2020

In these troubled times, we take joy where we can find it. I always find it when I read Joe Lansdale. When he isn’t scaring the crap out of me in a horror novel, he’s making me laugh out loud, a reaction that few authors can consistently provoke. Jane Goes North is a perfect respite from gloomy reality.

Jane is in her thirties, living alone in Texas. She was recently fired from her job in a laundry. She was nearly arrested after a night of drinking, when a backseat dalliance with a preacher in a church parking lot sent her sprinting naked into the woods to avoid inquisitive police officers. That’s how her life goes.

Jane has been invited to the wedding of her snooty sister near Boston. She’s not sure she wants to go, but spite motivates her to make the trip. Her car, on the other hand, is certain it doesn’t want to move another mile. A ride sharing notice on a bulletin board brings her to Henrietta, a tough old lady who calls herself Henry. She has one working eye and a car that runs. Henry is going to Boston for a medical appointment, but since she has a tendency to collide with things she can’t see, Jane insists on driving. The two women instantly dislike each other but bond over the course of the novel.

The road trip turns into an adventure that includes an improbable kidnapping. The women are pretty much unfazed by their ordeal because random crap happens in life and they’ve gotten used to it. The trip becomes more pleasant after they meet a washed-up country singer who uses her two hit singles as fuel for a career playing music at dives filled with drunken audiences.

The three women are loaded with personality — they’re sort of like Thelma and Louise with an extra friend — but collateral characters add to the humor with conversations that spin off in amusing tangents. My favorite is a desk clerk’s discussion of roaches that get stuck in toasters (“I call them Roach Toasties”).

Jane Goes North offers at least one laugh per page, often two or three. Here’s Jane talking to her sisters: “You wouldn’t be interesting, none of you, if you had propellers up your asses and could fly around the room with them.” An East Texas summer is “so damn hot during the day a lizard needed a straw hat.”

Jane is changed in a positive way by her road trip. Henry faces a change in Boston that the reader won’t expect. The ending is warm and heartening, reminding us that friendships, however unlikely they might be, are just what we need in difficult times. So, for that matter, is Joe Lansdale.

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