Daniel Boone, Backwoodsman, C. H. Forbes-Lindsay

   I really enjoyed a lot of the old fashioned cowboy-style/frontiersmen type movies that were very popular about 50+ years ago. I have probably watched hundreds of them. Now, normally when I read a book and then watch a film, I can often lament that there are certain aspects of the book which are inevitably left out of the films. That is true for Daniel Boone, Backwoodsman as well. The difference is that I appreciate being left out of the loop. You can pick up the book for free, courtesy of that great repository of public domain works, Archive.org in a variety of formats.
   I don't take well to racism. I feel this to be especially true about Native Americans, for whom I feel a great sense of respect. In the movies, when I see them, I don't see their ugly faces. I don't think their faces are ugly at all. I have a great deal of respect for their faces, even if they are the enemy of the given protagonist in the film; even if they do some bad deeds. I just don't get the idea that they're ugly. I'm left to my own view or aesthetic sensibilities. In the books, however, one gets into the mind of the writer and the characters. Those are ugly Indians. They're dirty. They're redskins. It really bothers me a lot. Maybe I'll give some more western style books a try in the future. But so far, the few that I have read are similar in how disrespectful they are to those whom we ought to view as our adopted ancestors.
   This book is a story about a famous individual. According to Wikipedia, he was a real man. How much of these stories are made up, embellished, or perhaps fairly accurate, no one can really know. Most likely it's a mix of all those. In any case, it's a book about how he fought in Kentucky for the settlers of the land.
   The way that they treated the Native Americans, and the way that Native Americans were often played as pawns in the games of white men, and summarily destroyed for trying to reclaim what had been their territory, is painful to read. It is of little consolation that, at the end of the struggle for dominance over that land, Daniel Boone himself was dispossessed by land speculators and swindlers. Sadly, though, those dispossessed Native Americans have yet to recover, and are the most ill treated minorities in America.
   I don't think I really recommend it. Though, it's an easy and quick read.

The Feud Buster, Robert E. Howard

I think, for as long as I can remember, I've been a big fan of Robert E. Howard's. Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) was a pulp fiction writer who died far too young. When his mother died, he decided to take his own life. Conan the Cimmerian is his most famous character, and probably his best. I grew up reading Marvel's renditions of Howard's barbarian tales, read his books, and watched the movies Feedbooks.com.
countless times. Later on I read some of his other books, which are also good entertainment. "The Feud Buster" is available freely at

The narration is in first person from the point of view of a massive and powerful man, Breckinridge Elkins. He's mistaken at one point for a bear. He believes his sister has given up herself to a man named Dick Jackson. This makes him very angry and so he sets out to force Dick Jackson to marry his sister. The language of the narration is quite entertaining. It's a kind of hillbilly dialect which is easy enough to read and adds a certain charm to it.

Like his other hero, Conan, this guy is of near super hero ability. When he's trying to figure a way into the cabin in which Dick Jackson is in, he hears a mountain lion in the hills. So, he goes up into the hills, finds the lair of a male lion, grabs the lion by the hand and throws him through the window of the cabin. When the lion does its thing, enemies of the family are about to string up Dick Jackson, but because he wants Dick Jackson for his sister, he's ready to fight all seven of them to get him. If it had been mere knuckles and whisky bottles, I'm sure it wouldn't have posed much of a problem for the brawny bearish giant. But, they had their rifles ready to defend their hanging. But it wasn't for himself he was wary.

But for one thing I'd of taken them guns away and wiped up the floor with them ungrateful mavericks. But I was afeared Jackson would get hit in the wild shooting that was certain to foller such a plan of action.

But the cabin, already damaged from the rampaging lion, had only the main post at the center of the hut. So, he tears it up and the roof comes crashing down on them all. He pulls Dick Jackson out of the rubble and takes him back to his sister.

But, Dick had failed in his attempt to woo his sister, and had decided to slut shame her for it anyways. Breckinridge lets him go (I don't know why. He deserved an ass kicking).

Howard has a way with telling a story. I don't know if there's anyone like him. He has the ability to grab my attention from the first paragraph and hold it steady until the last paragraph. This story is the hell of a fun one. If you like a good comical super human gun slinging Texan story, I highly recommend this one to you.

Wizard and Glass, Stephen King

The fourth book, like the others, continues the pattern of growth that the second and third set. The Gunslinger, according to Google, has 224 pages. The Drawing of the Three has 400 pages. The Wastelands 512, and I'm now into Wizard and Glass at 787. Regardless, a second hand paperback copy is available for as little as one penny on Amazon, while the Kindle version is $10.75. So, it is only a modest increase in price despite there being a full novel's worth of extra material.

The book has an introduction and an afterword that are original. So, unlike the first three novels, there is some little interest here. In the afterword, it's quite interesting to note how many years passed between King's writing of the third and fourth installation of The Dark Tower series.

Due to the sluggishness of The Wastelands, I had a good deal of fear that Wizard and Glass would feel equally dull through an even greater number of pages. However, I couldn't have been further from the truth. The Drawing of the Three was OK, with some sections that were good. But it just didn't have the literary flare or beauty that The Gunslinger had. And, for quite a number of pages, Wastelands was sheer drudgery that almost caused me to drop the book and move onto something else. Wizard and Glass, however, is another animal. Stephen King really mastered his craft when he forged this volume. I might even be so bold as to say that this volume is superior to the first. Where in the first volume was a mixed bag of genius and tired-and-forced expressions, there is none of that forced or tired feel to this volume. It reads brilliantly. I don't know what King was doing as he was writing this, but he was a bloody poet through parts of this. Since I have only read about 20% of the novel at this time, I can only hope he maintains his style and craft at this level.

The group of unlikely knights or gunslingers do very little in this novel. It is mainly a novel about Roland's background story. It's quite a good read. I'm glad I went through the boggy spots.

In the opening scene of Roland's story as a youth, we meet a witch that is to become involved with Roland as a young boy. Almost certainly not to Roland's benefit. In any case, it's just a marvelous scene:

... curled atop the box was a slim green snake. When she touched its back, its head came up. Its mouth yawned ina  silent hiss, displaying four pairs of fangs--two on top, two on the bottom.

 She took the snake up, crooning to it. As she brought its flat face close to her own, its mouth yawned wider and its hissing became audible. She opened her own mouth; from between her wrinkled gray lips she poked the yellowish, bad-smelling mat of her tongue. Two drops of poison--enough to kill an entire dinner-party, if mixed in the punch--fell on it. She swallowed, feeling her mouth and throat and chest burn, as if with strong liquor. For a moment the room swam out of focus, and she could hear voices murmuring in the stenchy air of the hut--the voices of those she called  "the unseen friends."

I would have preferred King to use a young woman, or younger, or of some average age. I've never been a big fan of coupling ugliness and wickedness together. Charlize Theron, for example, made a great wicked witch in Snow White and the Huntsman. For her alone was that movie worth watching. The wicked witches as haughty, powerful women, are a favorite of mine.

Another example of how King makes these brilliant flourishes that add a wonderful spice or flavor to his narrative:

(she) looked into the glass once more. The horse and its interesting young rider were gone. The rose light was gone as well. It was now just a dead glass ball she held, its only light a reflection borrowed from the moon.

Now that I'm further along, almost half way through the novel, it has become ponderous again. Some tired cliches about purity and virginity and golden yellow hair. The sick (perverted) old man is hot for the 16 year old girl, Susan, and has a hall pass from his wife on her since he's wanting a child and his wife can't (or he can't, but the narration suggests the problem is with her). Since the sick perverted man is also a powerful mayor, this is going to cause a major problem between Roland and the people.

I guess it's still in vogue today: writers who paint in moral black-and-white and rarely shades of gray.

Also, despite King being the sort of writer who doesn't mind saying fuck, when it comes to romance scenes, he's about as graphic as a cheap Harlequin novel. I guess the difference might be that in the Harlequin novel the scenes are not rape. Or are they? I have actually never read more than a few pages of a romance novel.

 His eyes were bulging, there were big drops of sweat on his forehead in spite of the room's coolness, and his tongue was actually hanging out, like a dog's on a  hot day. Revulsion rose in her throat like the taste of rotten food. She tried to pull away and his hands tightened their hold, pulling her against him. His knuckles cracked obscenely, and now she could feel the hard lump at the center of him.

He paints a singularly lecherous man who can barely contain himself for his desire of this young flesh. King can't even say cock this time. It's the hard lump at the center of him. What happened to you when you wrote this part, King?

Fortunately, the drudgery of this bland, two dimensional romance, is short enough to endure, and the narrative gets much better and easier to stomach.

Another few negative criticisms I have of King's narrative: First, his treatment of the veritable descendants of Mexicans. He refers to their language as 'crunk.' I guess it's the old cliché, right? Lots of movies were nasty towards Mexicans and (sic) Indians. Fortunately, I suppose, King left the Native Americans alone.

The next criticism I have comes from my feminist side: he refers to the virginity of Susan, Roland's love interest as something that makes her honest:

... calling her as she had all those months ago, on the night Susan had come to her hut to be proved honest.

I wonder if King would say that this is the language of the setting, or the perspective. Or if he just thinks a woman who is not a virgin is not honest? Or is King just trying to reflect the general sexist racist stereotypes for this one book? Or is King himself not racist and sexist, only his writing? Fortunately I'm white, so it's easier for me to swallow. If I was a minority maybe I'd walk away from King and his novel. Or maybe I'm too PC. Most of the time it's OK, and only mildly detracts from the story.

Gunman's Reckoning, Max Brand

Max Brand was, in the 20th century, one of the most prolific writers. Well, Max Brand is in fact the Gunman's Reckoning is available freely at Gutenberg.org. I believe there is also a free version on Amazon. However, it's blocked from those living in Canada while the one at Gutenberg is not.
pseudonym of Frederick Schiller Faust. He wrote hundreds of novels. Such a work ethic is something I admire in a writer. This is the second book of his that I've read, and there are several things to be said.

This is the third most popular book on Gutenberg by Max Brand. That said, let's get onto some parts of the novel.

The novel starts off really well. We follow the perspective of an outlaw who had had unfortunate luck because of a certain man by the name of Donnegan. He attributes his problems to the man and sets out to kill him in his sleep. However, his luck fails him, and Donnegan very nearly kills him. However, he's preserved long enough to learn that Donnegan wasn't after him at all. But, there's where the most interesting part of the story ends. That is to say, I found the character of the outlaw to be more interesting than Donnegan.

I am not particularly fond of the super human human type character. I enjoy the super human characters like Spiderman and such. And, to an extent I enjoy Tarzan and other Burroughs' characters. But I don't enjoy them as much as flawed characters.

In any case, there are a few undesirable or politically incorrect things to note about Gunman's Reckoning. First off, we have a black man, named George, who becomes the slave of Donnegan. He loves his master, sacrifices his life for him, and all with very little remorse in the tone of the author. The second thing is the relative inferiority of the female characters. For instance, Brand writes that 'For every lovely girl, no matter how cool-headed, has a foolish belief in the power of her beauty.' Another part, from the mouth of her uncle, "Man talk confuses a girl, Lou. You shouldn't listen to it." and finally, 'He had never seen such perfect self-command in a woman.' Over and over, we see that women are inferior to the man. They are to be fought over, adored, perhaps (grudgingly so) respected, but more often than not, little more than someone worth something as long as the face is pretty.

This book is filled with long drawn out drama. I'm not sure how I feel about that, either. It was
difficult for me to wade through. But, having already committed myself so far into the book, and the book being a fairly brief one, I finished it anyways.

Donnegan randomly goes to a house after his meeting with Lefty, the man who had tried to kill him, and runs into the love of his life. Her uncle is in control of her, and is an evil force to be reckoned with. But to win his girl, he plays the puppet for the uncle. He goes to the main setting referred to as "The Corner." It's a gold mining town, and the colonel/uncle wants possession of it.

There's a man called Lord Nick, who is in control of the mine's owner and the mine itself. He is huge and feared. He's also the long lost brother of Donnegan. However, Donnegan's mischief in trying to manipulate the town has brought Lord Nick's love of gold and a girl between family. Ultimately there's a gun fight, which Nick wins (Donnegan's weapon was empty), but does not kill Donnegan but just his poor manservant, George. When all comes out about whom Donnegan was in love with, and that he indeed was never intending to get between Nick and Nick's love interest, they make good and become a big happy family.

I wish I could say I really enjoyed the book, but that enjoyment was mostly confined to the first few chapters.

Way of the Lawless, Max Brand

Often in my blog, I lament the fact that many of the inexpensive books on Amazon lack the capability of tabbing through chapters. Until this book, I had never run into a Gutenberg book that also lacked this feature. Being unable to tab through a book is horrible. What's worse, is that this book also lacks a table of contents. So, there is no easy way to maneuver around the book. So, definitely there's a thumb down for this reason. However, it is a free book found at Gutenberg.org.

Essentially, this is the tale of a boy, Andrew Lanning, becoming a man and an outlaw on the same day. He sees a girl, falls in love with her, and shortly thereafter, gets in a fight with a man. He very nearly kills that man and makes his escape from the law. In doing so, he kills one of the deputies sent after him.

He becomes friendly with a group of outlaws, but does not become one of them.  He's killed once, and is afraid of having his soul corrupted by killing again. He therefore does what he can outside of the law to avoid killing those who are gunning for him. He shoots them in the legs or the arm, and thus he manages to avoid killing again.

The one hunter who is after him is Marshal Hal Dozier. That marshal is relentless. Even though he is shown to be outclassed by Andy, to not have any anger at him for killing his brother, he swears that he will never give up on the hunt even after being saved by him from Andy's murderous gang. However, he comes up with a plausible exit for Andy: dress up as a hobo and get out of the region. The marshal, meanwhile, would get a pardon for Andy and help him hook up with the girl, Anne, whom he'd fallen in love with in a single look at the start of the book.

There is a kick of humour at the end when the marshal offers the plan to Andy when Andy is considering the plan:

"Well," said Hal Dozier faintly, "what can you do with a man who don't know how to choose between a horse and a girl?"

 The book ends here, but let's assume he goes with Hal's plan.

I enjoyed the book. It does not have the luxuriant descriptions that I found in Zane Grey's books. At the same time, I didn't have to grapple with some of the gaudy descriptions of alpha males and females. Although Andy is the man's man alpha male of both strong moral character and unbridled spirit, it is not overwhelming.

Riders of the Purple Sage, Zane Grey

This is the second book that I've read of Zane Grey's. When I had finished his other book, The Last Trail, I had gone to Wikipedia.org to pick up a bit about Zane Grey. In the reading of the first paragraph, it mentioned that this book, Riders of the Purple Sage, was his first and perhaps his best book. The previous book disturbed me for its content, bothered me for its romantic interlude, its nearly perfect heroes and heroines, and most of all for the not too infrequent remarks about natives, and the plot which was quite cruel to them. However, what shone forth from that book was his ability to narrate a story with brilliant descriptions in setting. This book is available freely at Gutenberg.org.

When I decided to read this story, I wanted to choose something that was quick and easy to digest. This was both. But also there's this other thing that heppened to me in the other book that has given me a lot of food for thought about what I could do to make a new tale from the perspective of the other side of the coin. ie., from the perspective of the natives, or even the outlaws. A story like that has a lot of promise, and it could be teased into either a western or even into a scifi story. The more I've been thinking about it, the more I've liked it. Being an amateur writer, this kind of thing really motivates me to pick another story and read it.

With all that said, I'd wager that now's the time to dig into the book itself. I'd already finished reading the story by the time I started to write my thoughts on it.

First off, the amount of bad-mouthing that was bothersome in The Last Trail is minimal here. Most often they're referred to in the same breath as animals, and at one point as child-like. He even writes that maybe this way of thinking and seeing the world, with eyes too naive and young and innocent to lie either to others or to one's own self. Also, there are no Native Americans in this tale. They only exist in comparisons. Several times one might consider it flattering. They're supposed to be remarkably stealthy, and so to be quiet like an Indian would be a positive comparison to make about how the hero is able to accomplish something.

Another mention here that's important to the story is that this is a tale about Mormons. It's not a flattering tale at all. It's quite simply a mixture of a bunch of bad rustlers and Mormons who are rustlers. It's a tale of jealous rage where a girl is captured from a village to be added to the collection of wives. So, there does seem to be quite a bit of tale directed against the reputation of Mormons. Now, I don't know truth from fiction in terms of how Mormons were in those days. Although I was one for a year or so, I was in a small city where Mormons are a minority. So, mostly they're decent folks who don't want to bother other people. But this is something I've noticed in religions: minorities are often like that. It's when folks are the majority that the abuse comes, regardless of which religion it is. Having never been in Utah I couldn't say for certain that this is the case for that cult as well, but my social theory has deep roots in a long list of histories of a variety of cultures through the centuries. Human nature is what it is and seems to care little for the rules both real and hidden in a variety of different cults.

In this book, I might say that the characters cleanly fit the stereotypes that were set in the first book I read. There are two main heroes. First, the seasoned warrior, Lassiter. He is a man who has killed in cold blood, or so goes the legend (but the reality is he's a killer in the name of both defence and revenge). He is an alpha male who drives fear into the hearts of men who vastly outnumber him. Only in the end are any encounters detailed, and even these are secondhand tales told by witnesses or even by the main character himself. We are never actually exposed to the actual incidents.

The second main hero, Venters, perhaps the main hero but not quite the equal of the former, is young when we first meet him. I say he might be the main hero because we do get to see into his actions first hand like witnesses rather than as hearsay. However, in terms of the weight of narration, my guess is that the first hero has gotten the most printed about him. Back to the second hero: he is a boy on the very verge of becoming a man. He is a Gentile (non-Mormon) and more than half the host of problems that will assault the heroes and those who rely on their care. Well, at this time he's naked without a weapon, and it's with ease that he is being brought out to be punished for getting himself involved with a Mormon though he's a Gentile. This punishment is interrupted by Lessiter. His reputation as a gunman and his cold cool and calm confidence is enough to scare off the antagonists. However, after fleeing into the wilderness and stumbling on the woman who will become his love interest, he becomes a tough and hardened man who seems to be just as tough as Lessiter. However, at one point he does become mad (as in blood lust crazy) and murders a bad man in cold blood.

The women are basically two. The main female character is incredibly beautiful. There is no one to compare her to. She's the alpha female, and her beauty, wealth, and stubborn adherence to her own will are the main ingredients which continue to feed the narrative throughout the book. She is soft natured, and unwilling to prejudice herself against Gentiles even though she herself is a Mormon. She also works until the very end to shelter the Mormons from the guns of Lessiter until she's finally come round to the idea that there's nothing to do but stop violence with violence. Nonetheless, the violence that Lessiter commits is no longer on a hair trigger. It takes an awful lot of instigation to make him come at their enemies, guns ablazing.

The second woman also fits the profile of the ideal woman, though younger. She's innocent: too innocent. She's profoundly beautiful. Little is written about her. For most of the book she is helpless and on the cusp of dying except for the careful attention of, ironically, the man who shot her, Venters. She's then kept out of the excitement until the final act of the book hidden away in an old Aztec dwelling. She is weak and strong at the same time. At one point she is described as being a horse rider without equal.

Again, in this novel, the scenes are gorgeously rendered. Zane's detailed pen somehow manages to paint a stirringly beautiful rendition of his settings while at the same time adding tension and or mood to the scene.

This book was a lot less offensive to me than the first one I read. However, if I was still a Mormon, perhaps the opposite would be true. I think I would find it highly offensive.