Customer Reviews

Journey of the Dead

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

 

 

This is probably the most unusual book on The Old West that I've ever come across.To say that I enjoyed it immensely would be an understatement.Although the stories about Sheriff Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid have been told and retold by so many that at this stage it is almost impossible to sort the truth from the legend. In this book,the author introduces come very imaginative fiction to create a whole new approach to the story. You may not resolve much of the things that have been written; but that is beside the point, and not the reason for me thinking so much of this book. The author gets one right inside the inner thoughts and personalities of all the characters he covers.I found the book filled with historical facts, but it reads like a work of fiction.There are scenes after scenes that are so well described,that can only be described as masterfully imagined and written.I find it hard to think of any other western that has so many ,well written lines as this.The scene created with Garrett's meeting with President Teddy Roosevelt in the railway car will be unforgettable to me. The introduction of the alchemist is a brilliant idea and makes the whole story totally different fom anything else I've ever come across in a western.Then there is the continually reoccurring encounters Pat has with Billy Bonney in his dreams.

In this unusually crafted saga,Estleman takes us along with Pat Garrett and follow him from his earliest days until his death in 1909,basically all throughout the period generally known as the Old West.At times, the historical information is detailed like a history book,but totally without the drudgery we are used to.At other times the book gets fanciful and you can let your imagination carry you along with the thoughts and visions Eatleman is a master at creating.

Estleman ha also done an excellent job of tying in events in The Old West with other historical events in the country.Range wars,cattle ranches and drives,saloon and frontier life and and all its hardships,joys and dreams.He folds into it, politics,both locally and federally;and even carries us through the development and impact of various types of ranching and livestock,the introduction of irrigation ,the introduction of electricity and even the automobile. All this is accomplished in only 250 pages and is so well written,it is impossible to put down once started.

If there was ever a book that looks like it would be a great movie;this has got to be it.

I often like to quote a few of my favorite lines from a book;but this one has so many,I am completely at loss to choose a few from so many. All I can suggest is that you read it and find them yourself;the book is loaded with them.

This is the first of Estleman's books I've read;but won't be the last.

I have never heard of this author before I picked up the book in a local thrift store. What I can't believe is that I've never heard of this author after I finished reading the book. I can't wait to go out and find more of his books!

This book is essentially a fictitional account of the real life of Sheriff Pat Garrett--infamous for killing Billy the Kid. It has a secondary character who narrates and intersperses personal observations throughout the story, which adds an interesting dimension to the story. I'm not totally sure why he's there at all, but it does add a little 'drive' throughout the book--I wanted to keep reading to see what this narrator character was going to divulge next.

Estleman is deliciously ingenious with mental images. His passages read so brilliantly with his descriptions and metaphors that you can't help but instantly develop an image in your head as you watch your own internal moving picture. Simple phrases such as "...the clatter of a heavy wagon built of elm delivering a load of rocks smelling of moist earth..." jolts your own memory to relive personal images that almost match this scene and let you fall into the arms of the storyteller.

Ths story itself takes place over several decades and highlights supposed 'facts' of the life of Pat Garrett, but seems to fill in details while skipping them alltogether. You don't feel anything missing at the end of the story.

If you haven't read this book, or any book by Loren D. Estleman, I highly advice you to try him out -- even if it isn't this particular book. While I haven't read his other books yet, if his methodology and story-telling skills are equal to this slim volume, I can't wait to read the rest!

Having read and disliked Master Executioner, but seeing all the rave reviews Estleman gets, I thought I'd try another of his books.

This book is better than Master Executioner by far. The essential difference is the use of language -- nearly poetic here, plodding in the other book. Journey of the Dead is the combined story of Pat Garrett, the man who shot Billy the Kid, and of an old Spanish alchemist who lives as a hermit in the desert.

Estleman does a good, understated job of showing how Garrett is haunted by Billy's death throughout his life. The effect would have been stronger had their friendship been more extensively described. Still, the changing Billy the Kid legend provides an interesting way for Estleman to show changes in Garrett's life and in the West.

I found the plot to move a little slowly, probably because it concerns the life of a real person, more or less accurately reported as far as I know. Garrett tried many careers and had rather little success in any, according to Estleman, until he was finally murdered. This imposes a sort of flat quality on the plot. There are no big moments of drama, aside from Billy's death, and even that comes across as understated. Toward the end of the book, I got a trifle bored and wished for more tension and drama in the narrative.

Qualifies as a well-written work of literature rich in symbolism, with an entertaining story and a history lesson as well.

Kind of reminds me of something Cormac McCarthy would write if he did a historical western novel...

FANTASTIC book. Esteleman's writing leaves you in awe...you almost expect to be breathless reading parts of it.

Truthfully, the book really does lag in parts, when Garrett steps out of the west into the different stages of American history; and aside from the part hunting Billy, the time in the old west is lacking at times, but maybe that's just because Estleman tried to keep the book at least somewhat faithful to real life history and I was expecting something that had more of a traditional romantic aspect to the old west.

All in all, though, it's recommended. Estleman's writing style takes your breath away at first, and leaves you thinking later. Hell, I don't even like westerns, I just chanced upon this at some gas station on the road amid the normal pulp books found at any gas station, and I thought this a great book.

I like my books written in a more easy to follow style, but I liked the fact that Estleman seemed to have an insight into Pat Garrett's innermost mind. I can easily see Garrett feeling just this way. Estleman did a good job with what he started out to do. BUt I disagree with the statement from Kirkus Reviews about him having no rival in evoking the southwest. Kirby Jonas, whom critics call The New Louis L'AMour, is no doubt the best when it comes to describing and bringing country to life. Jonas also writes in an easier to follow style, and I would recommend his books to any fans of the west. But don't pass this Estleman book up if you like Garrett and Bonney.

I am not one of those who are deep into the story of Billy the Kidd and Pat Garrett, his executioner. But even so, I can tell that this book offers a truly new and powerful vision of Garrett's life.

Estleman is really immersed in the Old West, its nature and essence, from its early days in the late nineteenth century, all saloons and brass cuspidors, to the early twentieth with its Eastern businessmen, snorting automobiles and rumors of manned flight. Within this, he traces the parallel arc of Garrett's life, intertwined with the lives of so many others of that time, with a true sense of time's passing, and deep compassion for "the long man" and his holding to his inner core through many hard times and betrayals.

Garrett always corrects those who mention Billy Bonney as an "enemy." No, the word is "friend." He is tormented all his life by dreams of The Kid, sometimes so real he must rise in a sweat and check the place he is staying to be sure it was a dream.

Those dreams are what tie him into a truly original aspect of this book: the extended metaphor drawn from the once-famous practice of Alchemy. The narrator is an enigmatic Spanish- or Mexican- American figure, who has lived, he claims, through three centuries and traces his ancestry back to famed alembicists of the past. The Garrett saga is set out in three serial parts named Lead, Iron, and Gold, corresponding to three ascending levels of "nobility" in alchemical lore. ("Lead" is a great heading for the early period dominated by the bullet!) Yet paradoxically, at the end the alchemist deserts his craft to indicate that it is all a myth, that "gold" - that is, the absolute truth about Garrett's ending - is likely forever unknowable, just as the transmutation of base metal into gold is impossible.

Along the way, we are treated to wonderfully close descriptions of places, character, and events. Estleman has a fine hand for words and makes us share the sights, sounds and smells of the West, never sliding over into pretentiousness. Here's Garrett's wife making their home out of a long abandoned adobe ranch house, which "...had become a shelter for every variety of Southwestern wildlife; with a broom she drove out the porcupines and badgers, tied her hair up in a kerchief and climbed into the rafters to poke the little brown bats free of their inverted perches, then swept out the cobwebs and dried dung and scoured the floors and whitewashed the walls. She hung Indian rugs, blacked the stove and embroidered new sheets for the master bedroom and the guest room where John Chisum stayed when he came to visit on his way back from decorating the cottonwoods in old Mexico with rustlers from north of the border." (However, virtue is not always rewarded: for a spell later in Garrett's life he spends more time with a sex-hungry ex-pro than with his hard-working but sexually unresponsive wife.)

If I had to summarize the overall tone of the story, I think I might say "melancholy" or "elegaic." There's no getting away from the fact that Pat Garrett's life was more troubled than happy. But the excellence of the writing ensures the reader's pleasure nevertheless: towards the very end Garrett and a treacherous companion pass a decayed boomtown "inhabited now by prospectors motivated more by habit than hope, prostitutes too old and fat to move on, and the odd armadillo..."

Read it and enjoy. Ignore the few odd misspellings, though it is surprising that a writer so steeped in the Old West could list another as "Zane Gray" - even I know it's "Grey" and have read a few.

This is a masterwork. Loren Estleman's examination of the very soul of Sheriff Pat Garrett, the man who shot his friend Billy the Kid, is lyrical, poetic, mysterious and sublime. Garrett is haunted by his own act, and suffers a lifetime of sadness. This is a book that will become a benchmark in the literature of the American West. I think Estlemen is one of the finest novelists in the United States, and this novel is among his most memorable.

Absolutely gorgeous imagery, but any sense of storytelling gets mired in the dense prose. Sentences are long and complex, and by the time you get to the end of them, you forget anything specific happening. All you're left with are images, and though they're beautiful, it's not enough to engage me into any kind of profound reading experience.

The secondary characters were poorly develped and the story line was hard to follow, if there was a story line. I wouldn't even rate it a one star. The book was a complete bore.