A new Amazon customer review of Fourteen Western Stories:
This is truly a western read. It is just as wild as the west goes on paper. I especially loved the first story. WOW. What an aim straight for the heart. Worth the purchase.
Available on Amazon for the Kindle and for free Kindle reading apps, which work on almost all computers and portable devices. Free to borrow for Kindle owners enrolled in Amazon Prime.
Also available in a paperback edition!
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Nightfall on the Thames . . .
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Personal love — it’s the best kind.
. . . let the little girl through.
Western movies used to be referred to, usually dismissively, as horse operas. It’s not a bad term for them. Like classical operas, they might have silly plots or bad acting, but these things might be redeemed by beautiful music, or at least a few memorable arias.
Horse operas had their arias, too — passages showing superb horsemen riding superb mounts through handsome scenery, or in rousing action sequences. The quality of the horses and the horsemanship in Hollywood movies was almost always of the very highest order, even in the crappiest B-Westerns, so if you love watching images of fine horses ridden by fine horsemen, there is almost always great pleasure to be had from any kind of Western.
If you’re “tone deaf” to these visual “arias” in Westerns, to the kinetic melody of the movement of men and horses through space, you may find the appeal of Westerns baffling, just as a musically tone-deaf patron will find the appeal of many operas baffling.
This is your problem, not the problem of the operatic works before you.
Not a great critic, perhaps, but a great communicator of his love for movies, a champion of many good but neglected films, a supporter of obscure but worthy up-and-coming talent.
He was the guy at the barbershop who turns the conversation to the latest flick at the local movie theater and gets people jawing about it — so maybe in some ways more important to the culture than a great critic.
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He turned the greatest show on earth into a circus of horrors — don’t you just hate people who do that?
With thanks to PZ for pointing me towards this wondrous poster . . .
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Since switching servers just about exactly a year ago, this site has had over 300,000 page views. As I’ve said before, that’s not a lot by Internet standards, but it’s a lot by my standards. Thanks to everyone who’s dropped by to have a look.
This book collects the first seven Tales Of the Saturni — short stories of unspeakable, macabre doings, usually in the vicinity of New Orleans. I’d bought all the stories individually as Kindle editions and loved them, so I was thrilled to get this paperback collection of the tales as a Christmas present.
The stories are wonderfully entertaining and often deeply disturbing, as good horror fiction should be, and they begin to chart a mythology of terror which will eventually expand in a series of novels. These seven tales are a good way to enter this mythology — but be prepared! They get under your skin and may disturb your sleep!
You can buy the paperback for $6.00 here:
There is also a Kindle edition available for a mere 99 cents!
1947
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