In this story, the real Elvis Presley switched places years ago with an Elvis impersonator. Tired of the life of drugs, women, and people who wanted nothing more than his money, he settles in to live a life of obscurity in an East Texastrailer park, where he becomes the best Elvis impersonator ever. Then his health begins to fail, and he falls from a stage and breaks his hip. His trailer burns down and with it all evidence that proves he was the real Elvis Presley. He ends up in a shabby retirement home, which is where the story starts. Late at night, Elvis hears scuttling noises and other creepy sounds in the otherwise quiet Mud Creek Shady GroveConvalescence Home. He befriends a black man, who's convinced he's John F. Kennedy, and the two begin to piece together that an Egyptian mummy is stalking the halls and sucking up souls in the night. Together the two men confront the monster, as no one will believe them.
Adaptations
A film adaptation of Bubba Ho-Tep was released in 2002 and was directed by Don Coscarelli, who also wrote the film's screenplay. Bruce Campbell was brought in to portray the film's lead character of Elvis Presley and Ossie Davis as Kennedy. Due to a successful roadshow theatrical release held by Coscarelli, Bubba Ho-Tep quickly obtained cult movie status. Coscarelli never intended to create a sequel to Bubba Ho-Tep, but the end credits announced a second film entitled Bubba Nosferatu: Curse of the She-Vampires as a joke. He eventually changed his mind about this after seeing the positive reception for the first film and after several people inquired about when the sequel would release. Lansdale developed ideas discussed for the follow-up into a novella, ´´Bubba and the Cosmic Bloodsuckers", published in 2017. This story took place earlier in Elvis´s life, during a period in which he worked for Colonel Parker battling monsters prior to exchanging identifies with Sebastian Haff. In 2018, IDW Publishing released a five-issue limited series adaptation of the novella, retitled Bubba Ho-Tep and the Cosmic Blood-Suckers. The series was supervised by Lansdale, written by Joshua Jabcuga, and illustrated by Tadd Galusha., In 2019, Dynamite Entertainment published a four-issue crossover miniseries, Army of Darkness / Bubba Ho-Tep, a sequel to the original story which saw Elvis team up with Bruce Campbell's iconic character, Ash Williams.
Reception
Kirkus Reviews heavily criticized Bubba Ho-Tep upon its initial release, as they considered the story to be one of the worst of the Elvis anthology as they thought that Lansdale "spends too much time on The King's hard-ons" and that "too much bad writing leaves the reader all shook up and itchin like a man on a fuzzy tree".
