Customer Reviews

The Crossings

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4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
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With this 100-page novella Jack Ketchum once again proves his diversity as a writer. This time around he takes the reader to the Wild West, a period he has only once explored in the past in a short story that can be found in the collection "Peacable Kingdom". "The Crossings" is a first-person narrative, the account of a journalist who recalls his violent encounter with lawless criminals who force women into prostitution and whose sinister leader has a connection to an old native religion that most thought extinct. No it isn't and while this novel, like most of Ketchum's books, is not supernatural fiction, there is plenty of nasty stuff crammed into its few pages. It's quite expensive at 35$ but personally I found it worth every cent.

At barely 100 pages it's a short, nasty piece of work about three cowboys who help a young Mexican woman rescue her sister from a sex slave cult that worships the Aztec gods. It moves like a bullet with not a word wasted and it ends with a shootout set-piece that would give Walter Hill an orgasm.

A great thing about having a Kindle is that you can sometimes get rare and out of print stuff like this. It only cost me $4 and it was a great afternoon's reading. I'd spend more than that renting a movie.

Highly recommended for both Ketchum fans as well as fans of dark, hard-boiled westerns.

In which Jack Ketchum writes a short, brutal Western that brings many of his usual themes and motifs into the old West. Half of The Crossings follows a group of cattle herders; the other follows a group of women who have been kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by a group worshipping old Incan gods. The Crossings doesn't waste much time; this is a short little novella, and it becomes evident quickly that these two groups will soon come together in a horrific collision of violence and brutality, and neither of those counts are in short supply here. Ketchum has always been fascinated by how people who experience trauma and abuse react to such situations, and in watching these characters revert to what's almost a bestial state of violence, he ends up crafting a compelling enough little tale. But there's never much sense that this tale particularly needed telling, or that there's much profound to get at here; it's almost more of an experiment to see if it can be done. Well, it's done, and it's not a bad way to kill a few hours. But it's far from Ketchum's best, and in the end, it comes dangerously close to being something I never would have expected from Ketchum: forgettable.