Ghost Colts, Bad Wind Blowing, and Dust of the Damned- Brandvold’s Weird Westerns

Lately I’ve been turned off by one of my favorite western writers, Peter Brandvold.  Maybe I keep pickup the wrong books, but they never seem to be what I am looking for.  I think the problem is that I keep trying to read his series work, which I am finding a bit formulaic.  You know what’s really good?  His one-shot ebook weird westerns.  I reviewed Bad Wind Blowing last year and loved it.  I also just finished Ghost Colts, a cool ghost story.  Maybe I just need to stick to this part of his writing.  Dust of the Damned, Mean Pete’s werewolf western, came out recently, perhaps I’ll give that a shot next.

The Celebrity Cowboy- Erotic Failures in Western Fiction

Early in my blogging career I wrote a post about eroticism in westerns.  It is one of my top ten most visited posts, although I suspect that is because there is a somewhat pornographic clip from the video game Darkwatch embedded, and not because of my erudite writing.  I still like looking for westerns that not only capture the primal feeling of making one’s way through a wilderness landscape, but also the primal feeling of warm bodies in a passionate embrace. 

I occasionally have a moment of weakness and look this type of writing by grabbing a cheap ebook from the Barnes & Noble Nook store.  I browsed through my Nook today and found one story called The Cowboy Celebrity by David Shaw.  I don’t recall when I bought this, or why, but I apparently laid out $2 of cold, hard electric cash for it.  It is a short story that features a Wild Bill double that meets two married women on a steamboat trip and entices them back to his cabin, ostensibly to have them “model” costumes for a new show.

“Sweet Jesus, Clara, your tits are so big a man could stake out a claim on them under the Homesteading Act.”

So-called erotic westerns are often filled with loose, groan-worthy analogies to historical western events, like the one above.  We are also usually treated to fascinating details of penis size, like this:

“Oh, God, Georgina,” Clara moaned in shock.  “It belongs in a cage!”

The two women spend most of the rest of book talking about how big the man is, and how worried they are about fitting it within their demure forms.  I’m assuming that at some point they try it out, but I gave up before that point. 

Surely there is a novel out there that is well written AND has engaging scenes of eroticism.  Any suggestions?

Cowboy Dreams- If a Cowboy is a Crossdresser, is he a Cowgurl?

After my disappointing experience with John Locke’s supposedly best selling westerns, I decided to look for the most self-consciously trashy western ebook that I could find.  The Barnes & Noble Nook library has possibly thousands of quickly turned out cowboy stories that involve a variety of sexual arithmetic like m/f, m/m/f, and what I imagine is the highly prized m/m/m/f.  They all tend to blend together, and my search for something outstandingly trashy looked to be a loss, when I came across math that I hadn’t seen before- m/m/m.  I took another look at the cover of this ebook, Cowboy Dreams by Stormy Glenn, and saw what is on the cover of all of them, namely two bare chested cowboys and a half naked woman.  Then it started to click in my noggin, and I electronically laid down my $3.19 for this book.

Cowboy Dreams, you see, is not your typical cowboy ménage story.  It starts out as most others do, with two lifemate cowboys riding the range and coming across a scantily clad damsel in distress.  In this case the two are not hetero lifemates, but pards in the bed as well, and the damsel in frillies turns out to be a delicately featured young man.  Avery, soon to be called Ava, is on the run from an abusive past, and takes up with Boone and Jeb, two cowboys who have settled down in a town that is somehow open to homosexuality, polyamory, and crossdressing.  Boone and Jeb help Avery hide by disguising him as their shared wife, and in time get down to getting down.

When the three finally get together, I assumed that there would be a lot of complex anatomical geometry and references to undergarments, boots, and cowboy hats.  Instead there was lots of getting inside the characters heads about how they felt about one another and where their relationship is going.  Clearly this was written Venus, not Mars.

The book is decently written and moves along fast.  It should go fast, since it only came out to around 50 pages of text on my reader, which at $3.19 is really a rip off.  Stormy Glenn has put out north of 75 books and ebooks, so people clearly do like reading her stuff.  Alas, as a guy married to a woman, this was probably not a great choice for me.  To read something so unashamedly trashy without the claim to literature of John Locke, however, cured me of my reading malaise.  Now it’s time to hit the bookshelves and come up with something completely different…

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.

Bad Wind Blowing- Epically Awesome Trashy Western

Peter Brandvold holds a special place in my western shelf.  When I first tried getting into westerns almost a decade ago Brandvold had just published the first of his Lou Prophet: Bounty Hunter novels.  Funny, well written, and action packed, with at least one tawdry romance per novel, this series has been one of my favorite guilty pleasures.  Brandvold has written a number of other books under his name and the pen name Frank Leslie.  I have avoided them, though, they always seemed much grimmer than the Lou Prophet books.  A few weeks ago I stumbled upon Brandvold’s own blog, where he talked about getting a long shelved weird western, Bad Wind Blowing, published as an e-book.  I definitely need to read more of his books.

Bad Wind Blowing tells the story of a gold prospector, a school marm, and a female town sheriff fighting off the evil presence haunting the Poudre River Valley in 1800’s Colorado.  I am not sure where to start with this book.  Gunfights?  Check.  Demons?  Check.  Crazy Indians?  Check.  Hot sex scenes?  Got that, too, but less than you would think from trashy cover (in fact I am not sure how the cover is related to the book at all).  By his own admission, Brandvold has given up writing anything that would look like great literature in favor of writing great campfire stories.  He is dead on with this book.  Always riding the rim of being over the top, but never quite crossing it, Bad Wind Blowing is consistently fun page after page.  I am not sure if there is a literary category for brilliantly written trash, but Brandvold owns it for the western genre. 

Range War Bride: The Iliad meets Handmaid's Tale with Horses and Lasers

One of the surprising things about owning a Barnes and Noble Nook is the wide range of tawdry western e-books that are available.  Gay, straight, threesomes, foursomes, moresomes, there are hundreds of them available with a wide range of sexual geometry.  I came across Range War Bride by Lara Santiago, which was described as Erotic Futuristic Cowboy Multiple Partner Romance.  How could I go wrong?  Oh boy.

Range War Bride takes place at the end of the 21^st century, when a plague has made most women infertile.  A fertile bride is a prize worth fighting for, which takes us to this odd mix of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Iliad, and Firefly.  Most of the plot is over one set of brothers fighting over their right to marry the heroine instead of the cousins who run the neighboring ranch.  Yes, apparently in this future every fertile woman has to have at least two husbands, and everyone must have sex all in a big pile.  Tastefully, brother / brother incest was not included in this one. 

Sounds like time for a big showdown, right?  The book opens up with cowboys riding fence along some high-tech electric barrier, ready to face off with the neighboring ranch hands using pulse rifles, laser pistols, and sonic grenades.  Mind you they are all still on horses, which only makes sense in a Joss Whedon television show.   But instead most of the action takes place with the lawyers discussing the intricacies of future fertility and marriage laws. 

Oh, and there is some sex, which from the cover appeared to be the purpose of the book, but it wasn’t particularly memorable besides the ick factor of the brothers.  Hardly a western, I’m afraid.  I’m sure someone was waiting for a book like Range War Bride to come along, but it wasn’t me.