"You Think You Know Westerns—A Double Western Review" by Mike Baker

 

You Think You Know Westerns— A Double Western Review by Mike Baker    Stay Away, Joe by Dan Cushman Popular Library, 1953   In Stay Away, Joe (1953) by Dan Cushman, Louis Champlain and his family live on a Cree reservation in Montana just after the Korean War. Louis has been given 19 heifers and one bull by the Federal government to help him and his family out of poverty. News travels fast on the Rez about Louis’ newfound wealth and a big whoop up, a large unruly three-day beer party, spontaneously commences with Louis and all his friends and relations. Louis wakes up hungover on the third day to discover they drunkenly slaughtered and ate his only bull. His son Big Joe, bronc riding WWII and Korean War vet, comes back from the rodeo riding circuit and offers to help his dad get a new bull which everyone tells Louis is a bad idea, as Joe is a drunken, philandering, petty criminal, but Louis loves his boy, and things go horribly and ridiculously wrong from there. Stay Away, Joe sequentially tells a series of stories about how Louis goes from having nothing to being “rich” to having nothing again. Each step along the way either Louis or his family, driven either by the “old ways” are too generous or by trying to be like how they imagine “white folks” would act derail the Federal program of which they are currently a part. The book’s opening, and if you’ve read my reviews you know how much a I love a strong opening, is charming and hilariously funny. I can’t say more than that. You need to read it. Beyond that, the book meanders. It reminds me of Max Evans’ Rounders which seemingly goes nowhere except it does. It has what I call a “ta da” moment that cinches together all the threads into something tangible you can take away. Stay Away, Joe doesn’t do that. The book hangs. Cushman’s characters are fulsome and meticulously drawn deeply flawed human beings. They are not Indian stereotypes but, because Cushman was a white guy, you might make that claim. He doesn’t seem to me to be judging them but rather his critique might be what happens when you impose values on someone who isn’t native to those values or worse, you see someone else’s values as superior to your own and you acquiesce.   Cruel Angel Past Sundown by Hailey Piper Death Head’s Press, 2023        Meanwhile, Cruel Angel Past Sundown (2023) by Hailey Piper is about ranch wife Annette Klein the day she’s visited by a naked pregnant woman dragging a cavalry saber out of the desert. Annette and her husband Frank bring the woman inside where upon the woman straddles Annette’s husband in bed and eviscerates him with the saber as Annette, in a weird bloody eyed stupor, watches unable to stop the deranged pregnant woman as the woman eats her husband’s viscera. Later that night, Annette stabbed by the pregnant woman’s father who shows up looking for his daughter who he believes is the reborn virgin Mary carrying the Christ child. Annette gets away on her bull Big Pete who takes her into the town of Low’s Bend where she and her friends fight off father and daughter who have come to Low’s Bend, for different reasons, to pretty much murder everyone there. The book evolves rapidly though from a straight-ahead splatter western with a goth twist, something like a weird western but with a horror bent, into something more metaphysical which I did not see coming, wasn’t prepared for and struggled against until the end of the book. Piper writes in a mix of the mundane and the poetical and sometimes suffers for this because, imho, her voice feels uneven. It would be hard to write a book that was solidly poetical so that you have to find a balance drawing out certain lines. It reads here like two separate narratives, almost. There’s a particular moment, somewhere in the middle, where the main character gets bogged down arguing with a supernatural villain. It would be comical if it wasn’t meant to be deadly serious. It’s where the book is heading. Like I said, somewhere metaphysical. Also, the book deals with LGBTQ+ issues which I imagine might turn some readers off, you know who you are, even you guys should read this. I would, like Marcellus Wallace suggested, fight through that shit because it pays off. You might not like it but a few days later, as what I experienced sunk in, I got that I’d read something maybe important and, at the very least, interesting enough to be worth my time. You might ask yourself why I’m reviewing these two vastly dissimilar books simultaneously. It works like this: I started both books believing they were westerns and, it turns out, they are westerns in the same way Star Wars is a movie about trash compactors and intergalactic cabarets. They both have cowboys and Indians and horses and stuff but neither fits the bill for what most anyone would call a western. This is not a bad thing. The genre, which I love dearly, needs to be stretched and changed if it is to survive. My generation, as well as the generation before mine, won’t keep it alive. I believe that traditional westerns will only live on if first younger readers see a way into the stories and books and writers like Hailey Piper will bring in those readers. I wonder if Dan Cushman’s book had a similar effect in 1953 when it came out. I would like to imagine that it was the gateway drug from cultural elitists who read it, felt intellectually vindicated and then, while buying smokes at the corner store, saw a Louis L ’Amour book and thought, why not.

Stay Away, Joe, was adapted into a wonky and unfaithful film starring Elvis Pressley and Burgess Meredith in 1968. *             *             * Click here to purchase Cruel Angel Past Sundown for Kindle or here for the paperback edition at Amazon