"A Darktide of Westerns" by Mike Baker

 

A Darktide of Westerns by Mike Baker     I stopped writing monthly reports on my reading about the time my wife asked me for a divorce in February of 2024. Having momentarily forestalled the situation, I kept reading books and writing reviews but by November, she’d come back undeterred and even more certain that after 36 years of what I took for wedded bliss, she needed to move on and that, young readers, finally threw me so hard that most of what I’ve “read” in December has been on Audible because concentration became a limited commodity used up by my job and trying to avoid driving my car into oncoming traffic. That said, I did read a few books in December. A Wile E. Young book called For a Few Souls More that sucked and is reviewed elsewhere. Shotgun Marshal by Wade Everett which also sucked. Ditto the review. I read a couple of Tom Clavin American West histories, the Audibles I spoke of, that I bought because their 7-hour reading length matched the out and back I had to drive, heading to how it seems is the only way for my extended family to reunite: A funeral. A friend described Clavin’s books as having been researched off of Wikipedia and the History Channel’s website. That’s being generous. Regardless of his weak scholarship though, the boy can write and if you don’t mind shallow reportage, they’re fine introductions to subjects the interested will discover are significantly more complicated.

This brings me to the books worth discussing here: The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt and Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian. I’ve already reviewed the DeWitt book but I need to describe it for comparison. The Brothers of the title are infamous killers in the hire of the Commodore, an Oregon Territory boss, sent to dispatch the Commodore’s enemies into the hereafter. They have been sent to find a prospector named Hermann Kermit Warm who the Commodore claims stole from him. They haphazardly wander east towards California having strange experiences with odd souls and oftentimes, killing or severely abusing their hapless victims. They are themselves beset by stupidity, hubris, and cruelty. They are barely loyal to each other. These adventures occur without building toward the finale which itself feels haphazard and empty of purpose. The book moves along like a mindless puppy bounding and stupid or a ball bouncing wherever physics decides. It is like a medieval journey story—Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or Homer’s Odyssey—with less in the way of specific goals. Definitely more like the Canterbury Tales. Or, as monologuist Jerome Sterne said about lesser journey stories his students had brought him for his appraisal, the Brothers are “clowns in space” as they meander from one tragically comic, and seemingly random event, to the next with the whole of it summing with “What a strange night” or the more nebulous “wow, dude” whose simple mindedness defeats the history of art with one ignorant swoosh. You might say, this how life works, things just happen Baker—you can’t order art with a theory but that is why we have art. Life is meaningless. The best art orders it, if only slightly, giving our own real lost moments some kind of perspective that applies a tiny bit of sense to just some of it. The other fundamental problem with the book is that it betrays the one rule that sits at the heart of every good western—there’s someone for whom you want to live. Someone who stands against the shits and screwheads. An f’ing hero. This book is replete with villains, scoundrels, and louts—whores, assassins, and fools. These misbegotten mongrels are all the reasons God made gravity, heart attacks, and auto-erotica asphyxiation. There is no one rising above their failings to lead us. There is no one for whom I gave one good goddamn. The writing is fine. DeWitt is a stylist and for so many pages of me begging for the end, the ending (after the action’s crescendo) is peculiar in how it satisfies. Saying more would ruin its fine and gentle catharsis. I’ll likely re-read it at some point. Alex Grecian’s Red Rabbit is a meatier proposition. Sadie Grace is the Witch of Burden County and a few local knuckleheads have put a bounty on her pretty scalp for reasons best unraveled in the reading. Meanwhile, Rose Nettles—now called Mullins—is burying her recently deceased husband Joe Mullins under a sycamore tree. She’s stranded on a farmstead that she can’t maintain and is without prospects. Grecian delivers upon her two saddle tramps—Ned Hemingway and Moses Burke—a witch Master named Old Tom and his charge, a child of uncertain gender that Tom calls Rabbit. Tom’s headed to kill Sadie so Grace and the cowboys tag along. They are followed by the ghost of Grace’s husband Joe who doesn’t know much but is pretty certain this is a bad idea. I am a western traditionalist preferring square jawed, honest, and quiet tough guys, bitter struggles and godless terrain. And I like both flavors. Patten and Kelton. Sometimes Castle and occasionally, Elmore Leonard. I’ll read a Piccadilly Cowboy book but I won’t be excited about having to do it. I do not think Blood Meridian is God’s gift or even McCarthy’s fifth best book. My point is that I came to weird or horror westerns accidentally. It’s like that cookbook, Come for Drinks – Stay for Dinner. I bought Ed Erdelac’s High Planes Drifter expecting to hate it and came away believing in Erdelac’s talent and the idea that weaving in the strange and terrible might be the only way my beloved genre survives. Red Rabbit has all the gore and violence you expect in a splatter western but with something else. Grecian loves every character in that book so that even the villain, who is an awful son of a bitch, invites you into empathizing with his wretched plight. The story meanders but instead of building toward the meaninglessness that The Sisters Brothers says is at the root of life, each twist and misadventure drives the motley crew toward an uncertain but devastating conclusion. And this is where the book falters slightly. I am one of those rare souls who does not enjoy how some movies end with tiny “what happens to the character” synopses. I would much prefer my own imaginings than the author’s well intended slatherings of hope and resolution. I would say skip it but you might like that sort of thing. The funny in this cosmic joke is that I’d recommend both books. It is possible that DeWitt’s Waiting for Godot like outlook on the why of our lives, sits too uncomfortably in my heart as I contemplate what a 55 year old man does for his second act. And Grecian’s book has flaws I have not discussed because they’re academic and have to do with my own writerly ambitions, my particular tastes in literature and perhaps, like I just said, I really needed a pat and happy ending to settle the constant rumbling in my gut these days. It would be without an understanding of the awfulness of human history that I might say things couldn’t possibly get worse in 2025 so let’s just say it is my fondest hope that the tides turn in all our favors as we put December behind us.

Check out The Sisters Brothers on Amazon—Kindle edition here and paperback here. Check out Red Rabbit on Amazon—Kindle edition here and paperback here.