1970s Western Splatterpunk: Six-Gun Samurai & Sloane

 

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.

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.