What Rough Beast - James A. Moore and Charles R. Rutledge

WHAT ROUGH BEAST is a new limited edition chapbook from James A. Moore and Charles R. Rutledge, with art by Keith Minnion, available from White Noise Press. It combines horror and sword and sorcery with a Western yarn, making for one of the weirder Weird Westerns you'll ever read. And it's top-notch work, as well.

The protagonist is Tom Morton, a deputy whose wife is on a stagecoach lost in a snowstorm. When he asks for help from the townspeople in looking for the coach, three of the four volunteers are strangers: Jonathan Crowley, a normal-looking hombre who is more than he seems; Slate, a mysterious and dangerous albino; and a huge man who calls himself Kharrn. No mister, just Kharrn.

This odd group sets out to look for the stagecoach, but there is more lurking in the snowstorm than a disabled vehicle. The cover art is a pretty good tip-off to what's waiting for our heroes. They find a lot more than Tom Morton expected, and the result is a bloody, epic battle in the snow with creatures made more dangerous by the fact that they're partially human.

WHAT ROUGH BEAST is a well-written, fast-moving tale that generates quite a bit of suspense before it explodes into action. Moore and Rutledge have crafted an excellent story with some great characters, and Keith Minnion's art and production match it. This is actually the first thing I've read by these two authors, but I have several more of their books and look forward to reading them soon.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Enemy at the Gates

(This post originally appeared on January 26, 2009.)

I try to catch most of the World War II movies but missed this one when it came out. A young Russian soldier (Jude Law) becomes a sniper during the siege of Stalingrad and demoralizes the Germans so much that they bring in a sharpshooter of their own, an aristocrat played by Ed Harris. Most of the movie is a tense duel between the two as they try to get a clear shot at each other, but there's also a little romance and some philosophizing as well. This is a grim and gritty but intelligent thriller. It's also a rather old-fashioned movie that's staged and edited so that the viewer can actually tell what's going on. ENEMY AT THE GATES is a well-made, involving film, and I liked it a lot.

Now Available: Lone Star Fury - James Reasoner (writing as Jackson Cole)

A plea for help from a woman he thought was dead brings Texas Ranger Jim Hatfield to the ghost town of Palminter. What he finds waiting for him is a storm of outlaw bullets—and an even deeper mystery that leads him to a mansion on top of a sinister mesa overlooking the Rio Grande. To survive, the legendary Lone Wolf will need his keen wits—and all his deadly gun skill! 

Bestselling author James Reasoner brings his masterful storytelling talent to the iconic Western character Jim Hatfield, star of the long-running pulp magazine TEXAS RANGERS. "Lone Star Fury" is a 7000 word novelette originally published in CLASSIC PULP FICTION STORIES nearly twenty years ago and now available again from Rough Edges Press.

(Some of you know that I'm a long-time fan of TEXAS RANGERS and the Jim Hatfield novels. It was great fun getting to write about the character, similar to when I was able to write Mike Shayne stories. I never wrote any more Hatfield yarns after this one, but maybe I will again one of these days...)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Short Stories, October 10, 1932

Looks like another fine issue of SHORT STORIES, with a red sun cover by Edgar Franklin Wittmack and stories by H. Bedford-Jones, W.C. Tuttle, Cliff Farrell, James B. Hendryx, William Chamberlain, and Lemuel de Bra. It's hard to imagine that such quality was just an everyday thing during that era.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Frontier Stories, March 1931

This issue of FRONTIER STORIES has an eye-catching cover reminiscent of a movie stunt. I can see Yakima Canutt doing something like that. And the line-up of authors can't be beat: Walt Coburn with an installment of his novel BARB WIRE, which truly is an epic and maybe Coburn's best novel, Eugene Cunningham, Harry F. Olmsted, James P. Olsen, and an article about Tombstone by Walter Noble Burns. Definitely worth a couple of dimes at the newsstand.

Forgotten Books: The Sailor Dog - Margaret Wise Brown

I've had a lot of favorite books over the years, but this was my first favorite book, the one I bugged my parents to read to me over and over and then read repeatedly myself once I knew how. It's the story of a dog named Scuppers who has a boat and sails all over the world. He gets shipwrecked, has to survive on a desert island, eventually rebuilds his boat, and visits some exotic foreign lands. In pulp terms, it's sort of like a canine version of a J. Allan Dunn or H. Bedford-Jones yarn.

The art is by Garth Williams and is wonderful. Many of the images are still fresh in my brain nearly 60 years later. THE SAILOR DOG was first published as a Little Golden Book in 1953, so it was pretty new when I was a kid. I was surprised to learn that it's still in print, although anyone considering buying a copy should be warned that according to Wikipedia, the edition that's available now is abridged by four pages. I don't know which four pages were taken out or why, but if I were to buy a copy, I'd hold out for a used copy of the original edition.

One Bright Star to Guide Them - John C. Wright

In this novella published last year, John C. Wright (an author I've been aware of but haven't read until now) harkens back to THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE, PETER PAN, and all the other books where British schoolchildren travel to magical lands and have all sorts of exciting adventures. But Wright approaches that subgenre by asking what happened to those brave youngsters in all the decades after those adventures, when they have to return to their mundane lives, as well as how they handle it when their dangerous past crops up again.

The protagonist, Thomas, is a corporate drone whose memories of that other land and his journey there with three of his friends have receded thirty years into the past. But then Tybalt, the talking cat who accompanied the kids on their adventures, turns up unexpectedly and warns Thomas that a great evil is loose again and threatens to venture from the realm of faerie and wreak havoc in our world. According to Tybalt, it's time to get the old gang together again and stop this from happening.

Well, I'm a sucker for stories where some old geezers band together for one last, great adventure, of course, but Wright doesn't go for the easy way out in his plot. Not all the intrepid adventurers are still alive, and not all of them are still pure of heart, either. Thomas will have his hands full keeping England, and eventually the whole world, from being taken over by the evil Winter King.

ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM is a very well written book mixing fantasy and adventure with a little philosophy, and Wright packs enough plot into it to have kept a lot of writers going for a whole trilogy of fat novels. In fact, there are enough throwaway lines about previous adventures and magical places to fuel a seemingly endless series of doorstop volumes. I really like the fact that Wright blows right on past all that and tells a story that feels like an epic without taking thousands of pages to do so.

Since reading this novella, I've read some of Wright's short stories and enjoyed them as well. I have some of his full-length novels on my shelves and will get to them eventually, I hope. For now, I really enjoyed ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM and think it's well worth reading.

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Underdog

(I was going to try not to use any reruns in this series and Forgotten Books this year, but you know how that goes. Road to hell, good intentions, etc., etc. I made it for more than a month, though! This post originally appeared in slightly different form on January 11, 2008.)

Okay, you may not believe me on this, but UNDERDOG is a pretty good little film. Sure, it’s a kid’s movie, and it’s based on a cartoon series that was remarkably primitive even for its time (and not in a charmingly minimalist sort of way, either). But in this live-action version, the dogs are cute, the script is funny, and so are Peter Dinklage and Patrick Warburton (two of my favorite actors) in over-the-top performances as the villains of the piece. There are lots worse ways to spend an hour and a half.

How the West Was Written, Volume 2: Frontier Fiction, 1907 - 1915 -- Ron Scheer

The Western has a long and glorious history, and nobody knows the early era of Western fiction better than Ron Scheer. The second volume of his examination of the genre, HOW THE WEST WAS WRITTEN: FRONTIER FICTION 1907 - 1915, is pure pleasure to read for anyone who loves the genre. This book and its predecessor aren't really histories, but more of a critical look at various authors of early Western stories and novels, back in the days when what they were writing about wasn't far in the past.

Scheer's introduction focuses on Owen Wister and his novel THE VIRGINIAN, which established so much of what was to come in Western fiction. Then in turn he takes a look at cowboy stories, female and Canadian authors, the more pulpish and popular Westerns, and realistic tales of ranch life, mining, the timber industry, etc. There are a lot of familiar authors covered: Clarence E. Mulford, Zane Grey, William MacLeod Raine, Charles Alden Seltzer, Dane Coolidge, James B. Hendryx, and others, many of whose works are still available today, as well as once popular but now largely forgotten authors such as Peter B. Kyne and Harold Bell Wright. He also covers a number of authors almost completely unfamiliar to me.

All of it is fascinating and told in clear, insightful prose. I really enjoy books like this and have a hard time putting them down once I've started. That's certainly true of HOW THE WEST WAS WRITTEN. If you're a Western fan or just interested in American literature (it doesn't get any more American than Westerns!), I highly recommend both volumes in this series.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Hollywood Detective, November 1943

That's kind of a goofy cover (what else would you expect from Trojan Publications?), but I like it. And I'm sure the stories inside this issue of HOLLYWOOD DETECTIVE are goofy but fun, too. Robert Leslie Bellem wrote two of them under his own name, Dan Turner yarns, of course, plus the Dan Turner comic strip, plus stories under his pseudonyms Ellery Watson Calder and Harley L. Court. Filling out the issue are stories by Laurence Donovan and Harold de Polo. I always enjoy pulps like these when I read them.