Cowboy Covers- North West Romances

When the Wild West became tame, frontiersmen, gunhands, and saloon girls moved up to the Klondike!  This magazine appears to have run one Jack London story each issues, framed by stories of pulpy goodness.  In related news, I am currently listening to the audiobook of The Floor of Heaven, a non-fiction history of western icons like Charlie Siringo and Soapy Smith making their way to Alaska.  Expect a review soon.

Five Things I Learned From Shalom on the Range

1- Never trust critics- Shalom on the Range has a series of great reviews from western authors on it back cover.  On Amazon, it has an average rating of 4 ½ stars.  By the end of the first chapter I was sure that I was reading a different book.

2- Trust your readers- Each new scene in Shalom on the Range seemed to start with the same way, with long, laborious details to give you an exact image of every character.  You don’t need that.  Trust the reader to fill in the details.  Give them a sense of what is happening, and let them fill in the gaps.

3- Everyone needs a good editor- In the first chapter of Shalom on the Range there were continuity errors, geography errors, anachronisms, and I believe a grammar error.  Something that is easy for a writer to overlook (I certainly have fraked up enough in this blog) but also something that a good editor really should have been able to fix before the book was published.

4- Racism isn’t funny- Even if you are a Jew mocking anti-Semitism, it really gets tiring after a while.  The entire book seems built on two ideas- that people may not be as racist as you though, or may be way more racist than you thought.  I gather that these scenes are supposed to be funny, but they just felt painful.

5- Cowboy boots are functional- It turns out that they are pointed to make it easier to get your foot in the stirrup, and have high heels so you can brace your foot in tighter.  Hey, something good did come out of reading this book!  

To be fair, Shalom on the Range is not bad, and I am curious to see what other western mayhem author Michael Katz may be writing, but this novel feels like the publisher or editor did a real disservice by not shaping it into a finer work before being released.

Roland of Gilead

"I do not aim with my hand; I aim with my eye.
He who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.

I do not shoot with my hand; I shoot with my mind.
He who shoots with his hand has forgotten the face of his father.

I do not kill with my gun; I kill with my heart.
He who kills with his gun has forgotten the face of his father."

~Roland of Gilead~

Time for confessions- I’ve never finished the Dark Tower series.  I’ve read The Gunslinger several times, both versions, in fact, but I can’t get through The Drawing of the Three.  I find Eddie Dean so pointless that I just can’t keep it up.  The Roland Deschain that I know best is Roland of Gilead, who I followed in the Marvel Comics retelling of his childhood through the Battle of Jericho Hill, ultimately seeing what crafted the sorrowful and relentless hunter of The Gunslinger.  One day I will get past this and read the rest of the series, but in the mean time these images continue to lurk in the dark trails of my mind.

(That, and that notion of running a D&D adventuring party called the Big Coffin Hunters.  How great would that be?)

Jonah Hex #69- Daddy Issues

It doesn’t have a single on-screen gunfight, has no saloon girls or sexy lady gunslingers, but this may be the single best issue of the current run of Jonah Hex.

Warning: yonder lay spoilers.

For over five years we’ve had a monthly look inside the crazed and scarred head of Jonah Hex, watch him prefer violence to solve almost any situation, and indulge in carnal sins to forget his troubled past.  Again and again that past involved Jonah’s brutal father, a perpetually angry man who tortured Jonah through his childhood in the hopes of making him a man that can take care of himself in the west.  Now, in this issue, Jonah catches up to a wounded and dying father and has one last palaver before watching him pass on.

“Without me, ya’d probably be dead, or worse… a banker”. 

While Jonah hates his father, he is always painfully aware that his father’s “lessons” made him stronger, allowed him to succeed as a tough as nails bounty hunter, and ultimately kept him alive time after time.  In this final conversation there is no redemption, no real closure, just one hollow man watching another hollow man die, with the only real connection between the two Jonah's slow realization that he is becoming his father.  Any son or father of sons reading this will have a moment where they recognize something about themselves in these two angry men.

Jonah Hex has one more issue to go before it turns into All Star Westerns as part of DC Comics new reorganization.  The current run has ranged from good to great, and despite low sales and their despicable film DC has continued to support their lone western.  Let’s hope that All Star Westerns continues this fine tradition.

The Sisters Brothers

Part western, part hard-boiled crime story, part Don Quixote-esque quest tale, The Sisters Brothers is a rollicking western that also makes a great audio book.  It is a tale of two brothers, hardened gunmen working frontier towns.  The older of the brothers is a cunning killer, the very picture of the Wild West villain.  The younger brother, our narrator, is a chubby, introverted, and introspective reluctant follower.  Both work for a mysterious crimelord known only as “The Commodore”, who sends them to the ’49er California gold fields on a mission of revenge. 

The Sister Brothers flows along like some of my favorite novels, with a picaresque open moving episodically from one absurd situation to another, as the brothers slowly make their way to the California gold fields.  Once there, characters and motivations established, the tone of the novel changes, and we see the brothers’ fate unfold before us.  The book is by turns funny and tragic, as a good tale should be.  Set a decade before the Civil War, it is set in a refreshingly different space and time, close enough to the traditional western to be easily understood, but with just enough difference to stand out from the pack.

I started this blog to find the perfect western.  The Sisters Brothers isn’t quite it, but it is good enough to make me believe that the perfect western is still out there, waiting to be found.

Big Ass Beard and a Bad Ass Scar

When I was in high school a musician friend wrote a song about his career aspirations.  I only remember a few lines of the song, “Mountain Man”, that went something like this:

I want to be a Mountain Man

I want to get a real dark tan

I’m sure that there was more to the song, but what stood out to me was the idea of the mountain man.  I don’t think that I had ever heard that term before.  In the years that followed I read more about them, and it sounded like an ideal job- living in desperate poverty and loneliness in the mountains, always on the look out for danger, exposed to blinding blizzards and blazing heat, trading whisky and trinkets for the indifferent embraces of native women, and being swindled by The Man at the annual rendezvous.  Awesome.  I have of course always know that I was unlikely to be a real mountain man, mostly because I lacked two things that every mountain man should have: a big ass beard and a bad ass scar.

Luckily, a bit of open heart surgery earlier this year left me with a nice slice up the chest, and enough time off from work to develop the manly beard that I had wanted for so long.  The scar is a bit faded, the beard is much trimmed, and I don’t wear cowboy outfits nearly as often now that I am back to work, but that was a good day to have a big ass beard and a bad ass scar.

Shadow on the Sun- Richard Matheson’s Lost Weird Western

You might not recognize the name Richard Matheson, but odds are you are familiar with his work.  Most famous for the vampire novel I Am Legend (which was later made into several movies including The Omega Man), his work has also been made into the films What Dreams May Come, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Somewhere in Time, and Hell House.  He also scripted some of William Shatner’s best work, including the Twilight Zone Episode “Terror at 20,000 Feet” and the Star Trek episode “The Enemy Within”.  For all the horror and science fiction, though, it appears that Matheson’s also writes on heck of a Western.

Originally written as a film script, Shadow on the Sun is a short novel, but in the hands of most other writers this would have been a short story.  The writing is so crisp, so alive, that Matheson can take a simple action or description and spin it into page after page that keep you in rapt attention.  The story takes place at a lightning pace over just three days, starting with a new truce between an Apache band and the United States, and quickly spinning into murder, madness, and the brink of war.  As the book continues, supernatural elements start to slowly filter into the narrative, until ultimately it becomes a flat out weird western.  Nothing about the cover, title, or synopsis suggested a horror story, much less a weird western, adding a pleasant surprise to an already great story.