The New Frontier (A Double D western) [Hardcover]

Joe R. Lansdale (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 180 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1st edition (April 23, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385245696
• ISBN-13: 978-0385245692
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,563,767 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Joe R. Lansdale is the author of over thirty novels and numerous short stories. His work has appeared in national anthologies, magazines, and collections, as well as numerous foreign publications. He has written for comics, television, film, newspapers, and Internet sites. His work has been collected in eighteen short-story collections, and he has edited or co-edited over a dozen anthologies. He has received the Edgar Award, eight Bram Stoker Awards, the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the British Fantasy Award, the Grinzani Cavour Prize for Literature, the Herodotus Historical Fiction Award, the Inkpot Award for Contributions to Science Fiction and Fantasy, and many others. His novella Bubba Hotep was adapted to film by Don Coscarelli, starring Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis. His story "Incident On and Off a Mountain Road" was adapted to film for Showtime's "Masters of Horror." He is currently co-producing several films, among them The Bottoms, based on his Edgar Award-winning novel, with Bill Paxton and Brad Wyman, and The Drive-In, with Greg Nicotero. He is Writer In Residence at Stephen F. Austin State University, and is the founder of the martial arts system Shen Chuan: Martial Science and its affiliate, Shen Chuan Family System. He is a member of both the United States and International Martial Arts Halls of Fame. He lives in Nacogdoches, Texas with his wife, dog, and two cats.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "A First Blooding" by Max Brand, April 29, 2009

By 

Craig Clarke "Living After Midnight: Hard and... (New England) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The New Frontier (A Double D western) (Hardcover)

In 1987, an up-and-coming author named Joe R. Lansdale edited an anthology of Western short stories called The Best of the West, from which the Western Writers of America took all of that year's short-fiction Spur nominees. (If you're curious, Loren D. Estleman won for "The Bandit.")

A sequel was inevitable, and Lansdale served up The New Frontier two years later (dedicated to his "friend and favorite Western writer," T.V. Olsen). This follow-up had the same intention as its predecessor ("reaching for new horizons, new frontiers"), so it's interesting that it opens with a piece by Max Brand (née Frederick Faust), who died 45 years before its publication.

But "A First Blooding" is not a reprint; it's a 14-page excerpt pulled by Brand biographer William F. Nolan from Brand's unfinished Civil War novel, Wycherley (as yet still unpublished, since only 200 of its planned 600 pages were completed before the author's death). As one who has enjoyed all the Max Brand I've read to date, I leapt right into it.

"A First Blooding" consists of two connected vignettes wherein Yankee Lieutenant Allan Loring kills his first Rebel soldier then hears another executed. These two events are chronicled separately, and Brand seems to take two different approaches with them.

It doesn't feel much like a full story, but it is a very welcome look at the more serious writing Brand was doing before his death. In fact, the scene between Christopher Hodge and Major Acton was so effective the first time through that I went back immediately and read it again to see if I could discern how it was done.

This excerpt (only reprinted once to date, rather inappropriately in the Max Brand collection More Tales of the Wild West) certainly whets the appetite for more of Wycherley, and I, for one, would like to see it printed, however incomplete, as a testament to its author's continued ambition. (A master of the pulps, Faust deeply wanted to be taken seriously.) I'm as big a fan of his cowboy and Indian tales as anyone, but an author of Brand's stature should be appreciated for all facets of his career, and more writing like "A First Blooding" could help improve that.