Customer Reviews

The Riot at Bucksnort and Other Western Tales (The Works of Robert E. Howard)

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Robert E Howard's Western heroes create hilarious chaos wherever they go, from devastation at a crooked Election Day to the insanity produced by a young giant of a man going into a civilized town for the first time in his life. And darned near leveling the whole community. By accident.

Each & every story reads like the Saturday Night Live crew playing the Man With No Name.

Fine Westerns, don't get me wrong. But lots of laughs, too.

Robert E Howard is most famous for his "Conan The Barbarian" creation.

But this collection of Western tales proves his talent wasn't limited to that.
He was too good a writer to be limited to that.

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The Hipster gives it a Big Thumbs UP!

I think this collection of REH westerns is some of his best work.The hero of most of the stories,Breckinridge Elkins,is,to quote Howard, "of the Pecos Bill style". The stories go beyond comedy, into slapstick tall tales. Elkins absorbs more lead,cuts, and bashing in one brawl than ten ordinary men,usually before he leaves home.His horse Cap'n Kidd is the only thing on two or four legs thats a match for him and the story "Meet Cap'n Kidd",is one of the best in the book.The character in the next three stories, Pike Bearfield is not quite as outrageous as Elkins,and the stories a bit more realistic,but Howards use of dialect and humor is still very entertaining.The story "The Riot at Bucksnort" is written as a series of newspaper articles, letters and telegrams,and is indeed a riot.In the last three stories,Buckner J. Grimes,is yet more realistic and the stories not as funny,in fact "A Man Eating Jeapord" is a good straight foward western with some humor thrown in. If you like Howard, humor, westerns, or just good entertainment I think you will enjoy this.

R E Howard is one of my personal favorite authors, and I enjoy much of his work in the western genre. That said, I just couldn't get into his Breckenridge Elkins and other humorous westerns. By far Howard is at his best in his dark work, and that shows in the stories contained in this book. The situations Elkins and others find themselves in are intended to be hilarious but strike me more as ludicrous. Their redundancy doesn't help matters. The strongest quality of these stories is Howard's powerful writing, but that can't overcome their deficiencies--for me anyway. To anyone wanting to read Howard's work, I recommend looking for the other collections in this Bison Books series or the volumes in Del Rey's ongoing reprints of Howard's work as close to his intended vision as possible. This is a volume for the Howard completist only, and even then I'd have a hard time recommending it.