Customer Reviews

The Buntline Special: A Weird West Tale

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

 

 

I wanted to love this book because it sounded like a fun little steampunk western romp. However one thing kept me from enjoying the book....nothing happens.

Don't get me wrong, things do happen but I hardly consider one sentence descriptions to be action scenes. The gunfight at the O.K. Corral? Half a page. The climactic showdown that's been promised for the entire book? Half a page. The ending? A 1 page cliffhanger that sets it up for a sequel.

The rest of the book consists of getting breakfast and chatting in saloons and a wh@re house. Characters go talk to another character for a page, then back to the saloon. They wake up, get breakfast, go visit a character, then back to the saloon. Oh, Bat Masterson is, get this, turned into a bat! So there's plenty of dialogue about how to keep him caged up at night. It's 300 pages of this. I'm not even exaggerating, nothing happens except talk, talk, talk, solve the problem in a paragraph. There's no exciting or engaging solutions to any problems in this book, they're just there and then they're not.

I'm only giving this 3 stars because the dialogue and characterisations are very well written. Other than that I found it to be an absolute sleeping pill. Don't be fooled by the book description and go in expecting an action novel because it's not. I like Mr. Resnick's work but this book just felt completely lazy and phoned in. He had some good ideas that could have been alot of fun but didn't quite seem to know what to do with them. Seek out Ivory or Dragon America instead if you want a good Mike Resnick novel.

Plot Summary: The year is 1881, and Tombstone, Arizona is a town like no other. Served by horseless stagecoaches and illuminated by electric lights, this dusty town hosts the premiere inventors in the country, Thomas Edison and Ned Buntline. The U.S. government charges the Earps - Wyatt, Virgil, and Morgan - with protecting Mr. Edison from all enemies, and they send for their friends, Doc Holliday and Bat Masterson. This dream team will face not just the Clanton gang, but some fearsome medicine men, and a quick-draw corpse that used to be Johnny Ringo.

The Buntline Special: A Weird West Tale succeeds with the steampunk, but it never cowboy'd up to the culture. I think it had the potential to be great, but there were too many misses along the way. For instance, the dialog was disappointingly bland. I wanted to hear the Old West come alive in the poetry and cadence of the language, but everyone's speech was far too contemporary for a historical setting. I kept trying to insert an accent, but it wouldn't stick. Just a little bit of Mark Twain's voice would have given the whole story a flavor of authenticity. The only exchanges with any spark occurred between Doc Holliday and his sometime lady-love, Big Nose Kate:

<Quote>

He was suddenly overcome by a paroxysm of coughing, and sat down again. She brought him a handkerchief, and he handed it back to her a few minutes later when he was done.

"That's more blood than usual," she noted, staring at it.

"I don't know what you expect me to do about it. Cough out the window, maybe."

She stared at him for a long moment. "I don't know which to do," she said at last, "nurse you or kick you in the balls."

"Do I get a vote?" he asked. (241)

<End Quote>

I was excited to see this Wild West dream team of gunfighters assembled, but the reason behind it was too vague to drum up any further enthusiasm. We learn that the U.S. Government wants to expand across the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean, and they believe that Thomas Edison is their single best asset for overcoming the magic-wielding Native Americans. The Earps, Bat Masterson, and Doc Holliday are to protect Edison and his partner, Ned Buntline at all costs. This leads to the infamous gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but unfortunately the setup was so generic that it didn't give me much of a mystery to chew on in between.

The steampunk elements brought a glow to my brass-plated heart, and here is where The Buntline Special shined. The descriptions and illustrations were the stuff of steamies' dreams, and I happily plunged into the mechanized world of horseless carriges, gatling revolvers, and, er, metal "working girls." It was all well done, and by far, my favorite part of the story.

Steampunk fans will enjoy the ride, but the west was left in the dust, and I mourn its absence. This could have been amazing if The Buntline Special had truly joined The Weird with The Old West.

This was a great idea for a steampunk western tale but the author doesn't do much with it. It's a shame really he could have done so much more than what he did. A lot of talking but not much happening. The author would have been better suited to create orginal characters and put them into a steampunk western. This is an alternate universe but the author seemed unwilling or too lazy to go all the way with it.

At the end there's an unneeded history lesson that consumes way too much space than could have been better used to expand the story.

I had been really looking forward to The Buntline Special. I love Weird Westerns in general. I had also read on the publisher's blog that they didn't just want to publish steampunk novels, but wanted something with a twist. So when this book turned out to be a disappointment for me, it was a pretty big disappointment indeed.

For a 300+ page book, The Buntline Special felt pretty slight. The characters, outside of Doc Holiday, didn't feel particularly developed. It's hard to emotionally invest in characters you don't get to know. And if I'm not invested in the characters, I'm also not invested in their conflicts. And if I'm not invested in the conflicts, there's not a lot for me to care about.

Even worse, the "weird" elements just felt layered on top of a fairly lackluster standard Western. None of the fantasy elements were necessary. Electric powered stagecoaches? Robot prostitutes? Zombie gunmen? All window dressing. A character gets transformed into a giant bat, and absolutely nothing is done with it. If the fantastical elements of a story aren't going to be important, then they shouldn't be there at all.

So, overall, a wasted opportunity.

I wanted to like this book. I love steampunk and I love anything to do with the Earps and ol' Doc and Tombstone. That may be part of the problem. I have read so many really really good books set at this particular time and place that this book left me seriously wanting. It got the details correct, don't get me wrong, and the steampunk/AU elements were interesting...but the characters read like so many cardboard cut-outs. And one thing Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp are not are cardboard cut-outs.

This would have been far better as a screenplay and, maybe, that's how it started out. It is mainly dialogue with some action and a few descriptions. You can't get into the heads of any of the characters. If I already didn't know and love them from other books and movies, I wouldn't have cared enough to even get half-way through the book. If these had been original characters, I doubt I would even have gotten past the first few pages.

This reads like bad fanfic, where you don't even go through the motions to let people get to know the characters because you figure they already know them. They (and we) deserve more than that. This book did not encourage me to read any more books by this author. For the sake of fairness, I might try one more, but I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone to buy.

I read all the reviews before I bought this book. I can't believe there are so many poor reviews! I've never read anything by Mike Resnick before, but the O.K. Corral scenario and all the characters involved are my favorites in the Wild West. So what if there isn't a shootout on every page? I find it so interesting just to read about these characters. For all of you who didn't like it, try something a little more mainstream and a little less intelligent. Or should I put it this way so you will understand: this book good, me like!

I think I had something different in mind when I started. I imagined something more like Dreadnaught or Boneshaker, but this book is fun. It combines steampunk, with some history and comic books. Almost shelving it as soon as 'Bat' had his major issue, I waited to see what would happen. I am glad I did, because it was fun. Will watch for more!

I remember the Wild Wild West and Brisco County and I enjoyed them very much. It wasn't untill I read The Buntline Special that I realized that I enjoyed steampunk literature. I hadn't read any steampunk till this year, so I was new to this genre. I can say that I fell in love with Resnick's take of Tombstone 1881. He has blended fact with real live people of the era to create a new "modern" west. He takes Edison and his inventions puts them in Tombstone with Buntline as a builder of Edison's invention throws in Doc Holiday the Earps plus Bat" the Bat" Masterson to create at new but familar take on the greatest gunfight in western history. The pace is quick and the prose is no really spares but just the right amount to carry the story line and not bog down the reader. Resnick finishes the novel in such a way that there will be more books about this west. I hope so, because this is a light refreshing read. Resnick is the author of the Starship series which I have followed and he brings the humor he has there to this novel. In both that series, he takes one character and fleshes him out to be the hero. His heros are funny and are a take charge type of man. The action parts are quick and full filling to the reader. If you are a fan of Resnick's type of literature then this is going to excite you.

THE BUNTLINE SPECIAL: A WEIRD WEST TALE is set in an alternate 1881 where the U.S. ends at the Mississippi River and the magic of the Native American Medicine Man has halted the white man's expansion. Here in Tombstone Thomas Edison is on a mission to discover a scientific means of counteracting magic - and Wyatt Earp and his brothers have been hired to protect the genius. Totally engaging, this alternate history is a powerful pick!

Like many of the other reviewers, I thought the concept pretty cool. But the writing is really basic and straightforward--the plot comes right out of Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys. (I don't think it's supposed to be YA, if it is then perhaps I am judging it a little too harshly.) It's a very sanctimonious Wild West we are presented--there are prostitutes, but most are robotic. Sex is alluded to but never described. Violence is toned down. These characters hardly even swear, which is surprising considering the real life men they are based on.
I did like that Doc Holiday was based mostly on Val Kilmer's performance. And though the writing was simple, it is a short book and at times kind of improbably engrossing. There is a good idea here, but it's mostly lost in the over-simplistic portrayal of the era.