My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
The End of the Trail by Robert E Howard C
As I said, for "June on the Range" I decided to read a western. Why not? I've read westerns before -Lonesome Dove and its to prequels, and some Zane Grey westerns years ago. The originator of this reading event is Michael K Vaughan, and since his favorite writer if Robert E Howard, and the library had a copy of this book, I decided to kill two birds with one stone; read a western, and give Howard another chance. I read his Conan novel for another booktube event last fall, I believe.
As the title suggests, this is a collection of some of his western short stories originally published in the western pulps of the 1930's. And as you can see, I found them okay. While they did not exceed my expectations, and I had no great expectations, knowing what to expect, they did meet them, which, these days, is a win. I'm sure the original audience found them to be very exciting reads - cowboys and gunslingers, miners and outlaws, guns blaze away, bodies riddled with bullet holes laying on the barroom floor in a pool of their blood. Cold-hearted fast draw killers meeting faster drawing gunslingers, and their end. Gals that the heroes fall in love with at first sight, and marry a day or two later, after they riddle a few bandits and cruel gunslingers with bullet holes and then ride off into the sunset. In short, the American dream.
Vaughan is a well and widely read person, and I suspect that Howard is his favorite for sentimental reasons, but Howard was a good writer within the limits of the genre and time, and the time he took to write each story. He was making something of a living writing, in the middle of the Great Depression as an author of all sorts of pulp stories. So, if you like fast, deadly action, fearless gunmen in desperate straights, and don't care all that much about the inner lives of the characters, you may well enjoy these stories. And well, they are short stories, after all, so one can't expect deep characters. He does, however, sketch something of the driving motives of his characters for each of the main ones. And being a Texan himself, the Texans are always the good guys, the best of the best, bravest of the brave, and the fastest gunslingers in the west. It is said that in Westerns Howard found his true interest and genre.
You know me. I won't waste my time on books that don't appeal to me. I wouldn't have finished this if there wasn't an authentic feeling for the time and place in these stories. The time and place being the depression years, the dirty 30's when they were written rather than when they were set. I found enough interest in these stories to read them all. Not great, but not all that bad.
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