THE GREY HORSE LEGACY

by John Hunt ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 13, 1968

An exhaustingly fortissimo performance, with all stops out, this saga of blood guilt, mystery and frontier American heimlust set in an Indian Territory trading post in Oklahoma of the 1920's and later in Paris in the 1960's. Clay Carter is the embodiment of the primeval, brutal strength of the trading post, Grey Horse, to which Andrews Thayer, an Eastern lawyer, and his wife, Family, come, and it is Carter who seems to Thayer to be responsible for the terror of Indian murders depressing the community. With a fastidious belief in his own righteousness. Thayer has Carter jailed: as old ghosts are raised, tragedy swiftly follows. Thayer, taunted by Rita, Carter's wife, strangles her, then is accidentally killed by Carter's gun-happy lieutenant. Both bodies are burned in Carter's house. Carter's ""partner"" shoots himself, and a myth of Thayer's heroism and sacrifice for the town is constructed for her son Amory by Emily. When Amory is fifteen. Emily sends him away forever to the best Eastern schools, for which she pays with stolen money, and goes to jail. Rootless, the adult Amory in Europe, writing Westerns, married, finds in a brief love and the reunion with Emily, the meaning of his innate dark violence and his perpetual search for home and clusive sunlight. Terrible events sag with soliloquies; talk is transcendental; the sheer magnitude is overpowering. Epic effort; continuous thunder.

Pub Date: May 13, 1968

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1968

Categories: FICTION