I finished a couple of days ago. I really loved this book, which was somewhat of a surprise to me. I guess I started with a bit of negativity because it was written in vernacular – so I thought it would be a little difficult to read. It wasn’t. (As an aside, my perspective on this was likely skewed by “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” which I found tough going, due to the vernacular/dialect.)
I was sorry to reach the end of “Paradise Sky.”
Me too! I will make a big effort to finish the book today, if I possibly can. My excuse is that before I started it, I read Nat Love’s 100-page biography. In addition, I have to admit that I like Paradise Sky well enough, but I haven’t felt strongly drawn to picking it up again after I’ve put it down,except during one particularly dramatic episode.
It’s April 1st! Welcome to our discussion of Paradise Sky. Re the comments above, no worries. This can be a leisurely discussion, as people either finish up the book or try to remember it. 
I enjoyed the novel very much–it was quite a yarn. I like the Dallas Morning News blurb from the back of my book: “Joe R. Lansdale could fall into the Sabine River at its filthiest point and still come out dripping nothing but storytelling mojo.” Here are a few homemade discussion questions if you’re looking for a starting point. Many thanks to @ignatius for helping me pull these together.
Discussion Questions
I’ve never really thought about the “audience” for particular genres mainly because my reading skates all over the place. Now that I’m thinking about it though, I guess that I’ve just not paid attention to that fact. (Obviously it’s one that concerns publishers/book sellers - and now one of plusses of self-publishing, etc.) One of the book clubs I attend in real life adheres closely to the same type of book - over and over - sometimes discussions seem interchangeable from one novel to another. On the other hand, the CC Book Club ventures farther and I think my reading has benefitted from our choices. My library book club does the same. And yay! for book clubs in general.
As someone who has read genre fiction of one sort or another pretty regularly (romance and historical novels as a teen, a whole bunch of set at sea series, a few mystery authors, lots of sci fi and fantasy), reading a western did not bother me. In any event - I can count on* this* bookclub to provide interesting discussion even when I’m not a big fan of the book. I thoroughly enjoyed the tale as I was reading it. I liked Nat’s voice and personality. I got into the adventures. I was quite amused by him being so bothered by Bronco Bob embroidering his adventures and making him a white man to boot.
So let me get out and say this right now, then I read Nat Love’s actual autobiography and my opinion of the book shifted pretty drastically. Lansdale claims he’s basing his story on the real Nat Love, but as far as I can tell the only things he’s used is his name. He was born Nat Love, there was no kindly mentor teaching him to read, it was his father who died young, not his mother, he won a roping contest, not a shooting contest and on and on and on. Was I supposed to appreciate this on some sort of meta level? Did he feel he had to gin up the story to make it more exciting? I ended up feeling cheated. Would I have enjoyed a more realistic story as much? Maybe not, but I felt as it is he stole some real black history and twisted it for his own purposes. It’s always a bit of an issue with historical fiction, but I think if you are going to use real names, you should use real stories. It’s okay to fill in the blanks, but not okay to completely change the facts. This would have been a fine fun story without taking advantage of the real person.
I couldn’t agree more with what you wrote in your second paragraph, mathmom. The Nat Love of Paradise Sky bore very little resemblance to the man in the autobiography.
I hated the Loving character, who seemed contrived and improbable. I didn’t like the idea that the supposed Nat of Paradise Sky would need to be tutored by a “liberal” white guy. The real Nat left his home in Tennessee (not Texas) as a teenager and moved right into being a cowboy, was never a Buffalo Soldier, etc, etc.
I think…Yes and Yes. Lansdale is a gifted writer who was well aware of every detail of the real Nat Love’s life (see the Mulholland link in question #7). Your comments are pretty much an answer to question #1. As I see it, Lansdale is pulling a Bronco Bob, both as a joke on the dime genre and as a way to create a story that had characters and events even larger than the life he was using as his source.
Lansdale says in the Mulholland article that Nat Love’s own autobiography was “‘stretching the blanket,’ as they used to say, taking kernels of truth and turning them into a kind of hybrid product that housed both reality and dadburn lies.” This was his goal with Paradise Sky as well, and he admits that writing about the black experience was secondary to creating a myth.
I completely get this perspective, and yet Mr. Loving was one of my favorite characters. “Contrived and improbable” is the name of the game with this book; I see that as deliberate at every turn. I have mixed feelings about the liberal white guy stuff. I know that the idea of a “white savior” is offensive, but then how do you write a white person who is simply kind without earning that label?
I saw Mr. Loving as an extraordinarily kind man (who was white), who acted against societal norms, just as I saw Luther as an extraordinarily kind man (who was black), who acted against societal norms. Both “tutored” Nat.
I think Lansdale is probably smart enough to know what tropes he’s playing with. So I do think the contrast between the two mentors was deliberate.
I was looking for a list of western tropes. Lansdale hits most of the ones listed here:
https://spark.adobe.com/page/nb100/
It’s more than the fact that Loving was kind. He knew a wildly improbable amount of stuff. Luther was more plausible.
However, in my role as curmudgeon of the group, I must state that Luther’s having renounced Biblical literalism seemed anachronistic to me. (I probably shouldn’t even mention Loving’s compost pile.)
More than likely, someone is now going to find citations indicating that both things existed during the time period in question. 
To be honest, though, I didn’t pick up all that many anachronisms in the book – just one every now and then. But they bother me inordinately.
I’m currently ten pages from the end. I do think the book is well written. When I read Lansdale’s account of how he came to write it (in your link, Mary), I was impressed.
Nat Love’s autobiography is skewed to make it sound like he never failed at anything. I’m sure it is as distorted as Beryl Markham’s memoir, if not more so. Yet I was glad I read both of those books, whereas I had to push myself to finish the two novels based on the real people.
I was not in love with this book. I think the “shoot em up” passages lost me. It was an easy read, so that was good. I also appreciated some of the humor and was happy with how the story ended, but overall, it didn’t capture me.
I listened to the book on audio. Brad Sanders was a very good narrator.
I had no objections to the Loving character, and rather liked him, although I think I can understand @NJTheatreMOM perspective.
I had a hard time buying in on the strength of Sam Ruggert’s thirst for revenge, but then again, it was explained in a background story that Ruggert was nuts and was like a dog with a bone when it came to certain matters.
I suppose it fit into the whole Western Tall Tales - Dime Novel - What’s true, what’s not aspect of the book.
Mathmom listed the western trope of “cowboy” as something that Lansdale hit in the book.
Maybe this is true to some extent, but I don’t recall any real cowboys who played a significant role in Paradise Sky. Joe Lansdale’s version of Nat Love never worked as a cowboy! In his autobiography, Love goes on and on about his many years of driving vast herds of cattle over great distances in the western states. That was his identity.
I can forgive Lansdale for devoting only one sentence to Love’s having been a Pullman porter later in his life, but that work was apparently quite a big deal to the real Nat Love.
In the autobiography, Love rhapsodizes at some length about how marvelous the railroads were, and how wonderful his work on them was. This moved me finally to get hold of a nonfiction book I had read good reviews of back in 2004: Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Rise of the Black Middle Class by Larry Tye. I’m reading it next.
My dad, who was born in 1905, liked to tell stories about his work as a supervisor of railroad dining operations back in the 1920s, and Nat Love has written overly-glowing prose about the porters on the trains around the turn of the century. I am now interested in reading some carefully researched material about those old passenger trains.
I haven’t (yet) read Nat Love’s autobiography, so can’t comment on that. However, I always approached Paradise Sky as more of “dime novel” than not. In general, I have less trouble with the idea that Lansdale “fills his pages with true-hearted heroes, dastardly scoundrels, and rollicking adventures” (Publishers Weekly review) than I do with, say, Circling the Sun. Another example: The Invention of Wings - as in, aren’t the actual historical figures strong enough, important enough to carry a book. My guess is no - few would have touched a biography. In other words, historical fiction based on a real person often makes me uneasy - the author has to take liberties with conversations and thoughts and private moments - too closely blurring fact and fiction. Lansdale makes clear that he’s playing and straying by not adhering closely at all. I handle that better. Note again that I haven’t read Love’s autobiography; maybe I’ll change my mind.
I briefly thought the same thing. However, I had just finished Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs. The doctor who “owned” Harriet seemed as obsessive as Ruggert. Granted he didn’t want to kill her but pursued what he did want for years and years across states, hurting her family. Ruggert seemed less far-fetched than he would have had I not just finished Harriet’s story.
@mathmom’s list of Western tropes interests me. I’d like to look at that closer. I assume
But
It’s interesting to me that, while I enjoyed reading the book and basically raced through it because it was such an easy read, I now remember almost nothing of what you all are mentioning. Yes, I remember Loving, and Win, and Ruggert, but beyond that I keep mixing it up in my mind with The Underground Railroad.
Each time someone new appears in town they are “The Stranger”. It’s interesting that there aren’t really any cowboys depicted in the story. I think that when Nat leaves town with Win, he’s planning on farming more than cowboying, isn’t he? I don’t think Lansdale, did make it clear that he was so totally fictionalizing the Nat Love story. I’d just have liked it better if he’d made up names and said he was inspired by Nat Love, but there was no pretense that they had any real commonalities.
The story of the Pullman porters is fascinating. They formed the first all-black union in the 1920s. The Pullman company operated like a fiefdom with a company town and underpaid factory workers. The Pullman strike was a big deal in the 19th century with Clarence Darrow representing Eugene Debs who was organizing the factory workers.
I didn’t really believe in Ruggert either.
I’d say that overall, I am in @CBBBlinker’s camp. I liked the book from start to finish — and I had absolutely no problem with the made-up portion of the story. I didn’t go into it at all expecting a true piece of historical fiction. Admittedly, the violent passages were not anything to “like,” but I think that one of the themes of the novel is that in the Old West, brutality is rampant and life is cheap.
In several reviews and author bios, Joe Lansdale has been compared to Stephen King. To me, Ruggert—with his will-not-die monster persona—is straight out of the King character drawer. Or better yet, like a character in Joe Hill’s The Fireman. Remember the relentless Jakob and his plow?
When I was in a used bookstore recently, I saw an anthology of cowboy horror stories called Razored Saddles, edited by Joe Lansdale. (No, I didn’t buy it. 
) Per Goodreads: “The genre designation underneath the Avon logo on the spine of this one says it all: COWPUNK HORROR. It’s a collection of Western horror stories by some of the best writers in the fantasy field.” I think Ruggert is an escapee from Razored Saddles.
I attend the same camp as @Mary13 and @CBBBlinker, which leads me into #3. The humor in the book plays a huge part for me. I can’t remember the last time I laughed out loud while reading a book and I did here. I did note - and have a moment’s consideration of inappropriateness - when the humor scooted side-by-side with the violence. But my moment of consideration happened “a day late, dollar short” as I had already laughed. I think the humor stood out for me, as I had just finished one of those books that details the sad dissolution of a marriage and family. Trust me, no humor to be found therein.
As for Mr. Loving: He saves Nat, yes. But Nat saves him also. Mr. Loving lives alone. He mourns the death of his only son. He marches to the beat of a different drum than those around him. I see him as a lonely old man with a farm that requires work. He finds in Nat a hard worker, someone with whom to share his thoughts and interests, and a young man - probably about his son’s age - to love. If Nat hadn’t landed on that farm, Mr. Loving would have died a sadder and lonelier death - with no one close to leave his farm et al to. I guess I didn’t see Mr. Loving as “a liberal white guy” tutoring Nat but rather as an old man in need of companionship. That the companionship comes in the form of young black man in need of - just about everything - turns out to be a godsend for both.
The humor made the book more enjoyable to me than it would have been otherwise. I smiled a few times, did not laugh. I did appreciate many of the turns of phrase.
I also appreciated the fact that there were lots of nice descriptive bits that portrayed the details of people’s clothing and what the interiors of buildings looked like, etc. (I didn’t like the trash barrels in the climactic scene with Golem, through. There wasn’t much waste back then, as food slops were generally fed to pigs, and packaged goods had scarcely been invented yet, so what in the world would have been in all those barrels?) In addition, the use of the word “trash” in the book is anachronistic.
https://disposableamerica.org/themes/trash-vs-garbage/
Your take on Loving is very kindly, @ignatius. I don’t believe the book ever explained what a man like him was doing in East Texas. That would have helped. He seemed like such a fish out of water.
I did enjoy the humor in the book, perhaps enlivened by the reading on audio. The narrator captured the wry, and tongue in cheek humor parts nicely.