Killing Trail - Charles Gramlich

We recently bought a Kindle when Amazon dropped the price, and the first book I bought for it and read on it is Charles Gramlich’s Western collection, KILLING TRAIL. It was a great way to inaugurate my Kindle-reading experience.


KILLING TRAIL includes two novellas, “Killing Trail” and “Showdown at Wild Briar”; two short stories, “Powder Burn” and “Once Upon a Time with the Dead”, an excerpt from Gramlich’s unpublished first novel, a Western called THE BEAR PAW VALLEY, and a couple of essays, one about the Old West history to be found in the area where Gramlich grew up in Arkansas and the other about Louis L’Amour. All the fiction is outstanding.  These are well-written yarns with good characters and plenty of action. “Showdown at Wild Briar” is probably my favorite of the bunch, because the hero has to escape from a particularly deadly trap and then finds an even worse plot twist waiting for him. “Once Upon a Time with the Dead” is a flash fiction piece, very poetic and effective. These stories have really whetted my appetite for the first full-length Western novel that Charles is bound to write one of these days, sooner rather than later, I hope. For now, you can start off with this collection, which I give a high recommendation.


As for the Kindle itself, I enjoyed reading KILLING TRAIL on it. When such devices were first introduced, I didn’t think I’d like them, but since then I’ve heard enough people whose opinions I respect say that they liked reading books on the Kindle so I wasn’t really surprised. I don’t know how to do much with it yet, like change the type size or navigate through a book other than one page at a time, but I’m sure I’ll learn all the little tricks. It almost certainly won’t replace reading actual books for me, but for things that are more easily available on the Kindle – or only available on the Kindle – I think it’s great.