High Cotton: Selected Stories of Joe R. Lansdale

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GROWING UP IN EAST TEXAS, I KNEW EARLY ON that I wanted to be a professional writer, even though I wasn't exactly sure what a professional writer was. I began to write stories at a very early age. Perhaps as early as seven, though I can't be certain of that, as family stories vary. I know that when I was nine I was seriously trying to understand how stories were told, and I even put together a book of stories, poems, and my interpretations of Greek and Norse myths. I also included, for some unknown reason, the ancient Greek alphabet that I had copied out of an encyclopedia.

When I was old enough to sort of understand what a writer did to make a living, and I began to entertain the idea seriously, I thought that I would be a science fiction writer. I read all the time, and not just science fiction, but there was a time in my life where science fiction — and keep in mind I lumped fantasy, horror, science fantasy, weird adventure, ghost stories, anything odd, under that label — was my main source of reading matter, coupled with supposedly non-fiction books about things like flying saucers, Big Foot, ghost, and Fortean activity.

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