Coincidentally, I started reading this book the day the movie trailer dropped. I first read The Gunslinger as a twelve year old who was blazing my way through Stephen King’s works. Like many preteens, I was overly fascinated with sex and violence but had no real appreciation of the consequences of either. I did not care for this book at the time. It was too abstract and had the feel of the old westerns that my dad and grandpa favored, which I studiously avoided […]
Western Weird and Wild
I really like the western genre, and the genre subdivision weird western, so when MsWas sent an email offering this collection of short stories I jumped on it. This book has been on my radar for a while, and I was super excited to read it. Overall, I quite liked it and found it to be a pretty good collection. Not all stories fell into my personal preference, but they were mostly fairly enjoyable. I wasn’t as fond of the stories with a science fiction […]
Welcome to Westworld
Sometimes when reading a Cormac McCarthy novel I can’t help but wonder what kind of man he is, what kind of man would create such bleak and miserable worlds? This is pointless since I know from his biography that he is to all appearances a genial and downright nice human being. And perhaps writing books like this helps him in that regard, serves as a form of exorcism, his demons expelled onto paper allowing him go on living peacefully. But these are just useless random […]
The Corrupting Effects of Sivilization
Do you remember how the last third of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn made you hate Tom Sawyer? Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Robert Coover takes Mark Twain’s iconic characters, ages them about 30 years, places them in Deadwood just before America’s centennial, and uses them to expose the ignorance, violence and cruelty at the heart of America’s westward expansion. If The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was mostly an adventure story for boys, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a story of the loss […]