 |
Robert E. Howard
hoped one day to write an epic history of his native Southwest.
He didn’t live long enough to do so. But he did leave us
the next best thing in his wealth of Western stories that teem
with the action, color, independence, violence, and rowdy comedy
of the Texas spirit. In these stories, inspired by the legends
of Billy the Kid and other desperadoes, he records the bloody
deeds of badmen who storm across the plains like six-gun Conans.
These tales stand comparison with the classics of 20th Century
frontier literature, from The Searchers and Lonesome Dove to True
Grit and Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.
In “The Vultures of Wahpeton,” Howard combines somber
violence with an underlay of dark satire worthy of Ambrose Bierce.
Steve Corcoran, a Texas pistoleer, finds a job as deputy of the
boom town of Wahpeton. At first, he doesn’t know that his
boss is the secret head of the outlaw gang of “Vultures”
who are preying on the town. When he finds out, he is seduced
into joining the scam. But Corcoran is his own man, and when danger
threatens his saloon-girl sweetheart, he has to decide whether
to remain quiet or to dispense his own brand of .45-caliber justice.
Conan meets the Spaghetti Western – thirty years before
Sergio Leone invented the movie genre. In the sun-blasted Guadalupe
Mountains of West Texas, El Bravo’s outlaw gang captures
a pretty young
pioneer woman. Her only chance of escape is a man she hates, the
hot-tempered cowpuncher Big Mac McClanahan. Alone, Big Mac invades
El Bravo’s remote hideout, one man against a dozen renegades
in a game where superior cunning and strategy may even the odds
just a little.
An overlooked classic that recalls the angry populist spirit of
John Steinbeck and the violent atavism of Sam Peckinpah. In the
post oak country of 1930s Texas – Robert Howard's own homeland
– the rawhide spirit of the Old West lives on in hired hand
Jim Reynolds. To save his brother-in-law’s farm from foreclosure,
Reynolds shoots the creditor, rapacious financier Saul Hopkins,
the king of Bisley. Pursued by the law, Reynolds comes to a reckoning
at the storm-lashed dam of Bisley Lake, where another tormented
outcast has set a dynamite charge that threatens Bisley with extinction.
The town’s only hope is a man who hates it ... Jim Reynolds.
|