Quick Shots: Dust of the Damned

I was really excited to see this novel announced by my (once) favorite western writer Peter Brandvold. 

His first weird western, Bad Wind Blowing, was one of my favorite reads when I jumped into the genre, and I gave it a glowing review here.  The Lou Prophet series was still running strong with great writing, but was starting to fade a bit as Brandvold was getting more into writing under house names for series like Longarm.  His writing was becoming more just the typical paperback western, but surely something like a weird western would let him write something vibrant and unique. 

So how was the book?  There are… goblins in the west?  The Civil War ended with orcs?  Somehow things are just still humming along?  Something like that.  There was a plot, perhaps, and maybe some characters who were flatter than the Llano Estacado.  I read a few very forgettable chapters, put a bookmark in it, then said I’d get back to it.  That was about eight years ago.  I’ve picked it up occasionally, flipped through, and just couldn’t care enough to got back to it.

To be fair, here's the official description: "A novel about werewolves, ghouls, and cowboys, all fighting for their piece of the American frontier.

The Hell’s Angels are a gang of werewolves who have escaped from Hellsgarde Federal Penitentiary. They were the ones who tore the Confederates into submission at Gettysburg for Lincoln, thus ending the Civil War. Now they’ve headed West—to join the legions of other ghouls . . .

Armed with an arsenal of weapons, the deadliest being Marshal Angel Coffin, notorious ghoulhunter Uriah Zane must stop the hordes of shapeshifting creatures pushing west. Together, Zane and Coffin must stop the werebeasts from attaining final dominion over the earth—with humans as their servants..."

Sounds good, I wonder if we'll get it one day?

I miss those early days when Brandvold’s writing was fresh and it was all still new to me.  The buffalo are gone, the railroad’s come through, and the cat house has turned to a Starbucks.

General Lee Would Have Hated the Confederate Flag Bikini

To celebrate the 150^th anniversary of the end of the Civil War and the collapse of the Confederacy, I’d like to share some facts about the flag we today think of as the Confederate flag.

First, the flag with two diagonal blue stripes on a red background commonly believed to be the flag of the Confederacy is NOT the flag of the Confederacy. It was the battle flag of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, and was later incorporated in part into the Confederate flag in 1863.

Second, Robert E. Lee was a deeply conservative man who would probably object to women wearing his battle flag as a bikini. 

Third, as much as people take pride in the battle flag today, your ancestors probably didn’t.  Desertion was a huge problem in the Confederate army, described as “more damning than slaughter” to the CSA’s fortunes.  Over 100,000 Confederate soldiers, some 10% of the troops in uniform, deserted, and many more wanted to desert or tried and failed.  If you have ancestors that fought for the Confederacy, there is a good chance that they either deserted the army or wanted to, so wearing a Confederate battle flag isn’t honoring them, it’s representing a symbol of a system that trapped them.

Fourth, the secession of the Confederate States may have been about States Rights, but the only states rights issue that mattered in the 1860’s was slavery.  Name me one other that ever came up in the antebellum debates in the 1840’s &1850’s; the arguments of apologists from the 1920’s “glorious cause” era and forward don’t count when compared to the statements of people who live in the time.

Fifth, no matter what you think you are symbolizing when displaying a Confederate flag on your wall, your truck, or your body, it is at its heart a racist message.  The man who brought the battle flag into the main national flag put it on a white background because, “As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause.” —William T. Thompson (April 23, 1863), Daily Morning News

John Locke, the Jersey Shore of Western Writers

On a recent series of plane trips I decided to try out ebook author John Locke’s Emmett Love series.  John Locke is supposedly one of the most downloaded ebook authors, and his western series is apparently among the most downloaded western ebooks.  This is poor tidings for the genre.

The books are harmless enough, and so cheap that it is hard not to lay down 99 cents for some mindless entertainment.  The series is at two books so far, Follow the Stone and Don’t Poke the Bear.  They are pretty thinly written with nominally three dimensional characters.  Emmett Love, the narrator, is clearly a wish fulfillment Marty Stew, which works well in some series (like Dewey Lambdin’s nautical adventure books) but not as well here.  Each book has at least two characters who are mute, which is just the author’s way of cheating his way out of writing extra dialog.  It also reads like the author has done just enough research to get by, rather than just basing his books on old western television.  This, alas, is where my problem comes in.

The second book starts out in the opening days of the Civil War.  Emmett Love and the denizens of his little frontier town get into a short debate as to which side they are on.  Are they the North?  Are they the South?  Which side are you on if you are in the West?  It gave me a quick chuckle as it reminded me of when Larry McMurtry had a much better version of that exchange between Gus McRae and Pea-Eye Parker in Comanche Moon.  However, the humor quickly faded when I started to think about the setting for the novel- Kansas, 1861.  Any author writing about Kansas at that time must have at least heard about Bleeding Kansas, the low-level conflict between pro-slavery Border Roughians and anti-slavery Jayhawkers that lasted for most the 1850’s and killed nearly 100 people.  Everyone in Kansas knew what side they were on; no one had to ask.

It is bland, simple, poorly researched writing like this that gives ebooks a bad name.  Like bad reality television, it is easy to digest, barely engaging, requires little thought, and makes us intellectually poorer.

Seraphim Falls- Two Big Irish Guys Finish the Civil War

I haven’t posted a heck of a lot lately, because I usually write to chase off the demons and frankly a month a half of not working, lots of drugs, and yogic meditation does a lot to keep Old Scratch at bay.  I did find myself sitting down recently to pick some westerns off of my Netflix queue, including one I never heard of called Seraphim Falls.  I don’t believe that the script for the adaption of Blood Meridian is done yet, but whoever is writing it should take a look at this movie to see how a bleak, bloody western can be done.

Seraphim Falls takes a while to get into, largely because the action starts around eleven seconds into the movie.  Pierce Brosnan is shot in opening seconds of the movie, and spends roughly the first half hour being chased through the mountains by Liam Neeson and a band of hired killers.  Through this entire act, Brosnan’s dialogue consists solely of screams and groans.  It is a heck of thing to watch.

Eventually, the cause of the chase is revealed as a blood feud going back to the waning days of the Civil War.  As the chase goes for hundreds of beautiful mountain and desert miles, the distances close, and you start counting the remaining bullets on one hand, the emotional tension ratchets up.  Seraphim Falls, as it turns out, is a farm where good intentions turned to tragedy, leading to Neeson’s quest for revenge.  A seraphim is also a member of the choir of angels, which adds a metaphysical twist particularly when Angelica Houston turns up as a huckster, the Devil, or both.  Turns out that Scratch will tempt you when no matter where you run or how much meditation you do.

When the credits rolled I didn’t think that I liked Seraphim Falls.  My reaction was more in the line of “holy crap, what the heck did I just watch?”  With a little distance, though, it is pretty good if hopelessly bleak and blood drenched. 

Journey to Shiloh: Harrison Ford's First Cowboy Movie

I caught a surprisingly good movie a few days ago on my favorite channel, Encore Westerns.  Journey to Shiloh first caught my attention because of the cast.  The lead is a 27 year old James Caan, along with a cast of future stars including Harrison Ford, Jan Michael Vincent, Don Stroud, and Michael Sarrazin, as well as former child actors Paul Peterson (The Donna Reed Show) and Michael Burns (Wagon Train).  They form a group of West Texas toughs called the Cochise County Killer Comanches, and head off to join the Texas cavalry in defense of Richmond during the Civil War.  So far, so good, until you get to the opening song.

Groan.  To my surprise, things picked up pretty quickly after that.  The seven long haired Texans (or actors in bad wigs) make their way from their Indian fighting frontier eastward, ready to join the Confederate States Army.  Along the way, they realize that they had never seen a slave before, much less owned one; never met a Yankee, much less fought one; weren’t really sure that they were Southerners; and, finally, that most people in these here civilized lands were ornery liars. 

They never do make it to Richmond, and end up in a Florida infantry unit marching to go fight Grant at a place call Shiloh.  By the time the battle ends, only single, now one-armed, long haired Texan survives to ride back home.  By my count, more of his compadres were killed by Johnny Rebs than by Bluebellies. 

Pro-Texas?  Anti-war?  Extolling the virtues of long haired, buckskin wearing ruffians over dandified easterners?  There are a lot of messages in Journey to Shiloh, and some good acting as well.  A nice find in the sea of B movies.