Pale Horse Coming - A Review



The other day, Bill Wood lent me a copy of Stephen Hunter's "Pale Horse Coming," and voiced effusive enthusiasm for it.

The first thing that grated on my ear was the voice of the Sam Vincent character, in both his external and internal monologues. The dialogue seemed stilted or wooden. I didn't think the writer put a whole lot of craft into that character's voice. It was as if he thought that sounding stilted and wooden was just how Southerners in 1947 would sound.

Then, he sends this former Arkansas prosecutor into a corrupt Mississippi prison town which is isolated from any societal oversight. There, the author has him threaten and challenge the authorities, counting on due process and respect for the law to bend those authorities to his will, in a setting where those authorities are accountable to no one. Any Southern man, period or modern, would understand that to be a Very Bad Idea. To take a man who had been a prosecutor in Arkansas and have him not understand that was simply not believable.

What the writer cares about is guns, and the idea of hunting humans. He gets every detail of obscure firearms and cartridges right. The movie critic shows through as he recasts The Magnificent Seven, and, by extension, The Seven Samurai, in a Mississippi swamp. The cowboys he assembles for this are avatars of famous gun writers or movie people: Elmer Keith becomes Elmer Kay, Jack O'Connor morphs into Jack O'Brian. Earl Swagger brings in six of these folks from Mr. Hunter's pantheon, with their only motivation being that they will get to hunt and shoot humans. Apparently they share the author's fascination with this concept.

But the crowning touch for me was after the shootout in the main street of the town. The Audie Murphy avatar, Audie Ryan, shoots the last of the bad guys down. Slowly, doors open, and the oppressed people of the town come out on the street. An elderly black man walks up to Audie Ryan, and says:

"I see by your outfit that you are a cowboy."

Shameless.

Posted: Thu - May 1, 2008 at 06:48 PM        

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