Customer Reviews

A Breed Apart: A Novel of Wild Bill Hickok

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I bought this as a light read, and it was enjoyable as that. The tale combines fiction with some people and incidents from the real Wild Bill Hickok's life. (It helps if you've read an historical account of Wild Bill before this book so you can tell which is which. I recommend "They Called Him Wild Bill," by Joseph G. Rosa.)

I thought the book was pretty good until about the last twenty pages or so when Wild Bill tangles with your basic family of dirty, nasty, inbred, IQ-challenged hillbillies almost a la "Deliverance" (completely fictional). I almost wonder if the author was finishing up the book and then all of a sudden realized it basically lacked sex, and maybe he'd better throw some in for the sake of sales. (In all fairness, maybe it was his publisher's idea...)

Finally, with no transition and no real explanation (except for maybe "Bill, yer just ain't been the same sence the war..."), in the last chapter Hickock does a complete 180 in personality, temperment and values, apparently to enable the author to do a little fictional twist on the famous Hickock-Tutt duel in Springfield, Missouri... but mostly at the expense of any semblence of continuity.

So, the last part of the story didn't work for me... it was just a bit too bizarre, and didn't seem to fit well with the rest of the book. Also, the instant change in Hickock at the end didn't seem credible without some transitional narrative or some better explanation or reasoning as to why such a drastic change would take place in a person. There was no evolution of Hickok into this new personality--he was just all of a sudden, in the last chapter, acting completely different from that of the rest of the story.

The book ends with the Tutt duel, so leaves plenty of the Hickok legend left for a sequel or two. I'd consider buying a sequel to this book, but I'd hope mightily for an improvement in the storytelling quality. This first book missed the mark... it could have been better.

This is a weird, rich, and compelling take on the Wild Bill myth. It is one in which "time seem[s] unreal, as if each moment hung in the air far too long before fading reluctantly into the next."

The plot gallops from tragedy to betrayal, morphing from one Hickokian nightmare to the next. The novel bristles with foreplay and gun play, all circling around a Civil War battle that rivals Stephen Crane for detail and dialogue, and beats him completely in eeriness.

The language is so crisp and the description so vivid that when the narrator declares "the Ozarks is a savage little nation all by itself" the reader may find himself looking over his shoulder.

Read this novel straight through the first time to get the jolt of excitement, then go back to the beginning and read it again to savor the art.