Equal parts haunting and humorous; literally a warts-and-all gunslinger story.
In this debut novel, two killers find themselves on a collision course in the last days of the Wild West—but the march of progress will not halt supernatural forces from intervening in their conflict.
In 1912, the American frontier has been declared settled and the culture of the Wild West is in decline. One of its last bastions is Widow Tree, a town whose overweight and wealthy leaders buck the comforts of electricity and the railroad in order to attract tourists to the brothels and casinos of an ever disappearing Old West. Matt Hargreaves is a rich, heavy-drinking wastrel who was appointed a deputy of Widow Tree only because his father was the marshal. When a shootout in Canada ends with the death of a 12-year-old girl, Matt dives deeper into his excesses and is unknowingly targeted by Cpl. Justin Augustus, an omniscient, mystical force in the form of a revenge-seeking, uniformed Mountie. Meanwhile, while working a prison-transport job, the baby-faced psychopath Jody Simms finds Widow Tree and the surrounding area prime ground for indulging his lowest instincts, including rape, focusing on the frontier’s newest resident, Rachel Adler. Rachel is a complicated figure, posh, educated, and looking to carve out some part of the American West she has experienced in books for herself. Yet she, too, is haunted by portents of a demon—Simms—out to get her. Lunde’s novel is a down-and-dirty Western, opening with a penis boil and featuring plenty of viscera and corpses, the rampant and unvarnished racism of the period, and the brilliant, scatological ugliness one would expect from game-heavy diets and no indoor plumbing. Characters are venal and crass, more John Falstaff than John Wayne, and the tale uses this to great effect, sometimes disgusting readers with Simms’ sick actions or entertaining them with a closed-window farting contest between Matt and his father. Though principally a Western, the story’s fantastical flourishes are reminiscent of the early Gothic novel, with inexplicable darkness, visions of an ethereal world, haunted Mounties with dire warnings, and a singing phallus. While these facets all have big impacts on the plot, they are rarely explained to the audience. This will likely cause consternation in some readers, but it largely adds to the book’s eerie sense of adventure and mystery.
Equal parts haunting and humorous; literally a warts-and-all gunslinger story.Pub Date: July 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-949135-05-3
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Untreed Reads Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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