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1970s Western Splatterpunk: Six-Gun
Samurai: Bushido Vengeance & Sloane:
The Man with the Iron Fists By Mike
Baker I’d finished the relentlessly dark Blood Meridian
and then read Cormac McCarthy’s 3rd book, Child of God,
which, while entertaining enough for a Cormac McCarthy book, gets
progressively more f’d up as Lester Ballard becomes unmoored from his humanity,
descending into the hell of his unchecked subconscious. I needed a break—which
is why I grabbed Six-Gun Samurai: Bushido Vengeance,
which is book #2 in that series by “Patrick Lee”. When Tom Fletcher was a 12-year-old
midshipman on duty at the American mission in Tokyo, the mission was attacked
by ninjas. Everyone is massacred but Tom who escapes, is taken in, and
adopted, by a Samurai who raises Tom as his own son, training him to be a
Samurai warrior. When his American family is butchered by renegade Union
soldiers, led by notorious Colonel Edward Hollister, Tom heads back to the States
to get his revenge. Each book in the series finds him hunting Hollister and
his gang of murderous scum. This outing with Tanaka Tom is somehow
more insane than the first go. Tom is hunting a man who took part in the
murder of his family but is now acting as an Indian agent. The Indian agent
is trying to get two rival bands of Apache to slaughter each other so that
the Indian Agent can take their land for his boss, and Tom’s nemesis, Colonel
Hollister who led the soldiers that murdered Tom’s family. First, Tom
befriends one band of Apache and then he convinces the Indian Agent that he’s
a bad guy, gets hired by the Indian Agent, gets his cover blown blah blah
blah. He then rushes back to the Apaches and gets the two rival bands to
unite based on the principles of bushido which they intuitively get as noble
savages, and they all go to war against the US Cavalry. There’s a whole court case where Tanaka
Tom defends his and the Apache’s slaughter of the US Cavalry which is pretty
f’ing boring, but it leads to a climax on par with any spaghetti western/Shaw
Brothers extravaganza in its over the top, batshit crazy mass blood and
slaughter. I’m a
traditional guy when it comes to westerns. I, myself, started with Piccadilly
Cowboy stuff but then migrated to Lewis Patten, Clifton Adams and Elmer
Kelton because, and feel free to disagree, I need someone to root for and
cheering on Edge or Crow was essentially cheering on all my rage and
disappointment which I should have resolved in my 30’s. That said, the book
is so bonkers that, the stupid, boring ass court scene aside, its infectious
fun and the absolute absurdity of this book convinced me to buy book #3. |
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Still feeling Cormac McCarthy fatigue, I grabbed Sloane:
The Man with the Iron Fists, by “Steven Lee”, and
holy smokes, it is actually more ridiculous than Six-Gun Samurai. Sloane’s daddy is a sodbuster and one day
a Conestoga wagon carrying a circus troupe, led by a rubber nose wearing
clown, stops at the Sloane homestead asking for directions and water and ends
up with Sloane’s daddy getting tortured to death as Sloane’s mama is raped,
tortured and murdered. Sloane high tails it to the countryside to get away from
the horror movie his family home has descended into—let me be clear—this shit
is f’d up even by Picadilly standards. And Sloane doesn’t get away because,
like most circus troupes, their evil Apache runs him down with a horse and
stomps holy hell out of him with the horse and then leaves Sloane for dead. He is, of course, rescued by a Chinese
family whose wife is a healer and whose father is a kung fu master which
leads to Sloane living and becoming a kung fu master. They have a daughter
who Sloane later screws because the 70’s had some real messed up Freudian
whatever the hell that made David Hamilton ok for the American book buying
public and those creepy Pia Zadora/Brooke Shields underaged movies not seem,
at the time, creepy as hell. Sloane grows up and hunts the clown, and
his clown posse, down. There’s lots and lots of ultra violence involving kung
fu but also guns, acrobatics, knife throwing and yes, clowning. The only bad thing about the books, other than the story
etc., is that there were only two of them to make fun of. |
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