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Quickshots: Buffalo Trail

Two and a half years ago I quickly read and quickly reviewed a great first novel called Glorious.  I liked it so much I ordered the sequel, Buffalo Trail, and dug right in.  I’ve taken a lot of stabs at it in the last 30 months and haven’t gotten to the halfway part.  I think I’m done.

It’s a shame, because the novel is a buildup to the Battle of Adobe Walls, where the southern plains tribes went to war with the buffalo hunters.  The pacing is interesting, with one chapter following one of the buffalo hunters, the next following Quannah Parker gathering tribes to his side.  It should be good, but every time I got invested in one set of characters we were off to the next, and I struggled to care with the shift.  Tom Clancy did something like this in his amazing Cardinal of the Kremlin, where you got down to the nail biting last chapter not knowing which point of reference character will survive.  Here I couldn’t care.  Go read Glorious!  It was fantastic.

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.

Quickshots- Glorious

Can you get excited about a novel that telegraphed it's big mystery around page three?

Sure you can!  Journalist Jeff Guinn's Glorious is a pretty good modern western novel.  Set in St. Louis and Arizona in the 1860s, it plays well with some of the historical oddities of the period like the Robber Barons, impromptu mining towns, prospector culture, and the start of the big cattle ranches.  As a change of pace the hero is no kind of gunslinger; he fires a gun a handful of times at the end of the novel, and is more likely to talk his way out of trouble.

Guinn's writing is fun, fast, and readable.  Glorious is the first of the Cash McLendon trilogy, with the next featuring buffalo hunting and the Battle of Adobe Wells.  As soon as I finished Glorious I read 50 pages of Buffalo Trail (#2) and started looking for Silver City (#3).  Guinn will probably not hit my list of all time favorites, but the books are worth the time. 

Quickshots- The Hawkline Monster

 

Two turn of the century gunslinging hitmen from the Pacific Northwest are hired by a white woman in native dress named Magic Child to kill the monster that lives in the ice caves in the basement of her father’s mansion in remote Oregon.  Yes, you read that right, and it actually gets weirder from there.  This short novel from the 1970s is best described as a literary gothic horror weird western Lovecraftian comedy.  Also, sexy times.  Pretty great read. 

Gaming notes- this book makes a great inspiration for a Call of Cthulhu scenario.  Set in 1902, it’s right smack between the traditional Call of Cthulhu time setting (1920s) and the Down Darker Trails setting (1880s).

 

Quickshots- Call Down Thunder

 

I’m aging myself to think that anyone remembers the old Disney movie Davy Crocket and the River Pirates, but if you do you may remember Mike Fink, King of the River.  In that movie Fink was a bully juxtaposed against the good hearted King of the Wild Frontier.  The light but great Call Down Thunder by Kerry Newcomb follows Mike Fink’s career from a young ranger in frontier Pittsburgh to a keelboat captain along the Mississippi through the Red Stick War and Battle of New Orleans.  Fink’s more of the good hearted King in this book, and Newcomb introduces a different sociopathic bully riverman counterpoint that mirror’s Disney’s Fink and serves as the main villain for the story.  Bloody fights, frontier mayhem, and a little bit of sexy times makes for one of my favorite reads.

Gaming notes- As usual, I’ve spent way too much time trying to make Mike Fink as a D&D character (in Pathfinder a good River Kingdoms rogue/ranger/horizon walker or barbarian/river druid, maybe even a skjald if you like the hybrid classes). 

 

Quickshots- Peter Brandvold's Rogue Lawman

I was very surprised by the reading experience of Peter Brandvold’s Rogue Lawman.  From the cover description I was expecting a rollicking revenge story with brutal action scenes.  What I got was quite different.

Rogue Lawman opened up as revenge tales often do, with the horrible act that drives the hero to his task.  Gideon Hawk is a US Marshall, temporarily laid up with a broken wing and dealing cards on the side, enjoying some time with his loving wife and a son that, if he were born 100 years later, we would have called learning disabled.  Frankly, this was a pretty boring opening to what was advertised as a brutally action packed series.  However, when I look back on the book as a whole this may have been the best part.  The tender little family drama in the opening tugged a lot of heartstrings.  The Hawk family’s little imperfections, the troubles of the son, the parent’s acceptance, added a level of every day drama a la Steven King that got me emotionally involved in the story.

Then there were murders, chases, shootings, escapes, more shootings, blah, blah blah.  The action was a little repetitive, and the villain's regular escapes from our hero became predictable and perhaps a little boring.  When I think brutal western I think Cormac McCarthy; Brandvold doesn't hit that standard, but frankly who could?  Okay, James Carlos Blake does.  Also, any scene from the Jonah Hex comic that features Jonah's father.  Also, possibly the old Edge series, but I haven't gotten around to reading those.  

Peter Brandvold is mostly known for these kinds of action heavy books, and he is pretty good at it.  The writing of Brandvold's that I like, though, are the books with a human touch, with clever dialogue, with quirky characters.  He's written plenty of those books, so I'll leave the Rogue Lawman series of fans of rolling 

Looking for a Cowboy with a White Hat

I’ve been in the mood lately to read a sentimental, good hearted western.  You know, the kind where the hero wears a white hat, you can tell who the bad guys are, and you can get through the story believing that the lead didn’t pick up syphilis.  Not necessarily a simple story, but one where the moral compass of the hero guides him or her through difficult decisions and sees right and justice done at sundown.  You know, the kind of story the people think of when they make fun of westerns.

The problem is I can’t seem to find one.

The closest that I get are parodies of this kind of western: the modern Rawhide Kid comics, maybe the unsung film Rustler’s Rhapsody.  Fun, but I'm hoping for a novel, and the genuine article rather than a parody.  Whatever happened to that classic morality tale that makes up the stereotypical western?  Am I looking in the wrong place?  Advice, please, I could use some recommendations for a new book.

Quickshots- Peter Brandvold’s The Devil’s Winchester

There’s an irony that I write a quickshots on The Devil’s Winchester, since it has taken me over a year to read it.  I normally gobble up new books from Peter Brandvold’s Lou Prophet: Bounty Hunter series fast, as it is a quick, funny, and action packed set of novels. This one was barely interesting, and it was only memories of other, better books by Brandvold that kept me reading.   The Devil’s Winchester had none of the humor or character development we are used to seeing in the series.  Along about page 170 you see why, when Brandvold and editors slip up and call Lou Prophet by the name Longarm instead.  The Devil’s Winchester is at least partially lifted out of work intended for the Longarm series, and it shows that Brandvold is writing in a genericized housename style rather than in his own voice.  If my math is right this was the eighth book in the series, but the first disappointment.  Based on the past work I’ll definitely pick up the next book in the series, but I hope it really will be a Lou Prophet book, and not Longarm with a different name.

The Shopkeeper- An Unexpectedly Fun Western

When I first saw a short blurb about The Shopkeeper as a great new western from up and coming author James D. Best, I wasn’t sure what to think.  The description from the back cover, about an eastern dude (the eponymous shopkeeper) running into trouble in the west, did not inspire me with thoughts of grand frontier adventure.  None the less I picked it up as an e-book for a recent flight and gave it a shot.

The Shopkeeper is good.  Really good.  There are a couple of neat plot twists in the story, so I won’t say much about the plot, but rest assured it is highly entertaining.  The setting is a Nevada filled with mining camps, scheming businessmen, and corrupt politicians.  Despite the setting this is less a traditional western than a novel about cutthroat business in a largely lawless world. 

The Shopkeeper is a quick read, and well worth the time of a western reader looking for something new but still wanting to play in the setting. 

Victor J. Banis’ Longhorns; or, Why a Married Man Likes Gay Cowboys

Yesterday I was out in the woods with my wife of 15 years, riding our mountain bikes through a rough, stony trail.  After a few hours of riding we were dirty, dusty, muddy, and mosquito bitten.  Burs from the long grasses coated our legs, and we kept wondering how many ticks we were picking up during slow slogs through fields.  We rounded a turn in the trail and poured down what turned out to be a deceptively long and steep hill, with plenty of loose rock and branches to trip us up.  “Yahoo!” cried my wife as we barreled down the hill.  “Why don’t we do this every day?”  Later that night over dinner and a bottle of wine I looked at her and said “Man, am I glad I married you.  I couldn’t live with a dainty woman.”  

Not surprising to me, today I finished Victor J. Banis’ classic gay cowboy novel, Longhorns, over breakfast.   

Longhorns is at its heart a great cowboy story.  A young Nasoni Indian, Buck, rides into the Double H ranch at roundup and finds work as a cowboy.  He is fun, gregarious, attractive, and brings joy to every life touches.  Buck also doesn’t shy away from letting the cowboys around him know that he wouldn’t mind a ride in bushes, if you catch the drift of his saddle blanket.  The cowboys in Banis’ world don’t worry too much about this, as they all have taken a poke or two in the woods on lonely nights, but generally prefer fillies to broncos.  The Double H segundo, Red, quickly takes a liking to the boy, and while they make regular trips behind the woodshed, Buck has his eyes firmly set on Red’s pard, a somber trail boss named Les. 

Buck turns out to be the best cowboy of the bunch.  He can tame any horse, ride faster, shoot better, and it turns out Buck can cook up a cowboy meal that can bring the boys back for seconds and thirds.  There is some sex in the book, of both the cowboy-on-cowboy and cowboy-on-soiled dove variety, but it isn’t wall to wall and for the most part isn’t terribly explicit.  Longhorns is mostly about men being men in each other’s company, eventually coming to terms with the notion that they are uncomfortable in the presence of women and can find what they need, all that they need, with each other.

Now I’m not a particularly manly man, but I get this.  What I want in my life is someone who can share my musings and adventures, not someone who waits patiently at the homestead for me to return.  Come with me and get dirty in the woods, and when we are clean and well fed our love is that much better. 

Historical novels have a hard time making this happen.  If they are true to history, the women folk will daintily knit and sew while them menfolk go a’roving.  Some writers string together an extravagant tale of how their female characters ended up as the rare gunslinging gal, but it is hard to pull of convincingly (thanks, Peter Brandvold, for giving it a try with Louisa Bonaventure, "The Vengence Queen” of the Lou Prophet novels).  For this to work, where you have two historical characters that live their lives together, adventure, explore, and share an occasional intimacy in a way that feels genuine, sometimes you have to have two dudes.  And those dudes have to get it on.

Rest easy, pard.  Reading something off of the Brokeback shelf won’t suddenly make you gay any more than all that girl-on-girl porn you secretly watch has made you a lesbian.  And if you like it more than you thought, well maybe you learned something about yourself in the process.  Stories about two cowboys in a tangled romance always make my heart sing a bit.  They remind me of times past, hiking some rocky trail to the heavens, stopping to take in a view, and slipping my arm around the form of the woman I love.

Love is love, pard.  Love is love.