Country: USA
Genre: Western/Horror
Pages: 184 kb/146 kb/129 kb (eOriginals)
Order THAT DAMNED COYOTE HILL here
Order THE LONG BLACK TRAIN here
Order THE SPIDER TRIBE here
Other Heath Lowrance Books Reviewed:
The Bastard Hand (2011)
Dig Ten Graves (2011)
Miles to Little Ridge (2011)
"I'll take him."
Everyone turned to look.
The rider in gray had stopped his horse in the middle of the muddy street. Rain bounced off his had ans his broad shoulders. He dismounted, patted the beast on the flank, and started through the crowd. They parted before him in silence.
A common complaint of music fans is that a band will never live up to their first album. How could they possibly? A lifetime of passion created an object that thousands (sometimes millions) of people fell in love with, how can you follow that? Plus, can you really follow up on a first love? No. It happens sometimes in literature also, when a writer hits the big stage. Heath Lowrance is one of these writers who get better by the book, hell, by the story. It's not that he writes better, it's that his artistic vision becomes clearer, free from the clutter of meaningless details. If his first novel THE BASTARD HAND had a definite Jim Thompson/Charles Willeford edge to it, over time, he expanded his horizons into horror and western and became somewhat of Richard Matheson and Ira Levin's lovechild on steroids. His foray into the Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles universe was very successful, but his character Hawthorne is something else. Not only it's western literature like it's never been done before, but it's actually tough guy stories done right.
Now since Hawthorne's Adventures are short stories, it's a little difficult to construct reviews around a single release. So I decided to review them three by three, for they are structured a bit like comic books. The first adventure, THAT DAMNED COYOTE HILL features Hawthorne going into the cursed county of Coyote Hill to bring justice to criminals keeping on the down-low.
In THE LONG BLACK TRAIN, we catch up to Hawthorne already on the job, as he's chasing down a train that leaves a trail of suffering souls in its midst. According to the author, this one took a while to write and was quite difficult come up with, but its dual point of view from inside and outside the train was very ingenious and capital for the dynamic pace of this short.
Hawthorne's latest adventure THE SPIDER TRIBE pits him on the trail of the Iktomi, an aberration of a native tribe, who have been waging war on other natives and managed to wreak more havoc than the white men doing so. They are by far the most formidable foe Hawthorne has ever faced.
What Heath Lowrance nailed that most writers failed at is to create the strong-silent, mysterious type properly. Most authors feel obligated to weigth down their tough guy with a weepy backstory of murder, helplessness and revenge, in the name of character development. There is none of that to Hawthorne. All you have of his history is premature gray hair and a cross-shaped scar on his forehead, hinting that he had the most violent and stressful job for way too long. Also, you never really know who hired him and why he's pursuing the men he's pursuing. You always catch him on the job and Hawthorne's reasons always come up to surface. Lowrance does a tremendous job at letting his stories breathe and tell their own stories, like a house that bears the marks of time and weather.
The big man said, "You...you aren't Jesus."
"No kidding."
"But the cross on your head. Is it meant to mock? Are you the Devil?"
"No," Hawthorne said. "But the Devil is a friend of mine. Says he misses you. Wants me to send you along, pronto."
Giving his stories such a lean diet of emotional content, Lowrance frees the space to write some really impressive stuff. There is always a part of the setting that's a character itself. In THAT DAMNED COYOTE HILL, you can feel the thick and damp atmosphere of the hill like cold, long and powerful fingers closing around your throat. The dual point of view in THE LONG BLACK TRAIN turned a means of transportation into a man-made existential hell.
THE SPIDER TRIBE I thought didn't have the magic of the first two, because of a few factors. First of all, everything is too defined. The reasons why Hawthorne goes after the Iktomi are clear at the beginning and yet, they don't quite add up witht he character. The support cast feels unnecessary and borderline like clutter. Also, such a well-crafted and imaginative adversary might've benefited some more breathing room and a longer story. The fight is epic, but feels a little hackneyed.
Anyway, Hawthorne's Adventures were a great discovery and another fun and surprising addition in Heath Lowrance's growing cult literature legacy.They are only the three first chapters as a fourth is coming next winter, called BAD SANCTUARY. Count me in as a fan and throw me back to my comic book buying days (I was just buying THE INCREDIBLE HULK, really. Sometimes GHOST RIDER) because I'm down with a case of Hawthorne fever, baby! At 0.99$ a story, it promises to travel fast and infect many new readers. Seriously, what else do you want for Christmas but a quiet and efficient agent of karma, living out in the Far West?
FOUR STARS