Customer Reviews

Pale Horse Coming

5 star:		(52)
4 star:		(32)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Pale Horse Coming is classic Stephen Hunter -- an epic battle of good versus evil, the limits of human endurance, courage under fire, loyalty, and of course, guns. The story centers around two characters from Hunter's previous works -- Sam Vincent, gentleman lawyer, and Earl Swagger, WWII veteran and medal of honor winner. On behalf of a client, Vincent journeys deep into the wilderness of Mississippi to check on the status of a prisoner at Thebes State Prison - the location where the worst of the worst "colored" offenders are sent. Suspecting that he is walking into a dangerous situation, Vincent obtains the word of Swagger that he will come looking for Vincent if he does not return from Mississippi in a pre-specified duration. Of course, Vincent walks into something that is beyond even his worst nightmares, thus engaging Swagger in his pledge to follow Vincent. The story moves well, has lots of action, suspense, and frequent plot twists, while giving the author a forceful understanding of race relations in the deep South during the 1950's. If you have liked Hunter's previous works, you will enjoy this as well. It is a compelling page turner.

Stephen Hunter made a name for himself the last decade or so with the Swagger novels. Three involve Bob Lee Swagger, a Marine sniper in Viet Nam who just wants to retire peacefully to his native Arkansas. Pale Horse Coming is the second involving Earl Swagger, Bob Lee's father, a Marine Medal of Honor winner from the Pacific War who has returned to Arkansas to be a State Trooper. In this installment, an old family friend, Sam Vincent, gets himself into more trouble than you'd think a simple country lawyer could, and winds up a prisoner in Thebes, Mississippi, at a prison for Blacks that is so horrific it even has the same sign over the entrance as Auschwitz. Earl breaks Sam out of the prison, but is himself captured in the process. We then follow Earl through the horror of this place in all of its manifestations. Eventually, Earl breaks out, recruits a group of gunmen, and returns to kill the guards and destroy the prison.

The beginning of the book is paced reasonably well, but you know something more is going to happen, so you are anticipating what's to come. Earl's incarceration in the prison was interminable for me after a while: I think this is the weak point of the book. Once he escapes, the recruiting of the gunmen, and their return to Thebes, are interesting, with the proviso that suspense isn't an issue here: these guys are so good that the guards and local police don't stand a chance, and are soon running. Only the main bad guy characters provide any challenge at all. I gather that you can sort of recognize some of the gunmen from the last third of the book as pastiches of real individuals: the only one most readers are likely to recognize is a rather obvious Audie Murphy. This is in keeping with Hunter's previous books: Bob Lee Swagger's rival sniper in Viet Nam in Point of Impact is based on a real individual.

Given all of that, this is still a fun book. The plot moves right along, and the author has a good time with his characters. You can tell he's enjoying this. There's a whole sequence at the beginning with the Mississippi police deciding that a lawyer from Blue Eye Arkansas is probably sophisticated and a Yankee, and that drew several chuckles from me. I enjoyed this book a great deal, and would recommend it.

If you've read Hunter before you'll recognize his archetypes: sergeants, bold, strong and taciturn, yakky old southern or western gunfighters, pretty young women, dastardly villains who deserve the whacking they get and how. And that's Hunter: cliches executed with such bravado they transcend their own triteness. In this one, our hero Earl Swagger is on a mission from God: he's encountered a place on earth that should be in hell, a viciously racist southern prison farm for black men, where oppression is the style of the day. And so Earl, surviving but just barely, goes to town: he recruites a magnificent seven or a seven samurai and goes to war.
Hunter is both playful and sadistic in this one. His vision of the prison, with its ordeals of torture and oppression, its sense of crushing doom, is quite convincing. At the same time, he's having fun evoking movies (from Kurosawa, Sturges and Peckinpah) and literary sources (from Aeschylus to Faulkner, with Conrad and Freddie Forsythe thrown in for good measure), and part of the fun is catching his allusions.
But the end result is extremely poweful narrative magic: you cannot put this sucker down until the end, and if you look, you'll see that it's 5 a.m., you have an 8 a.m. appointment, and you won't care.

Stephen Hunter is the king of a niche that no one knew existed until he came along.

Hunter, the film critic for the Washington Post, knows more about rifles and ammunition than any man on earth, and will go on for page after page of muzzle velocities, sighting ribs, minute-of-angles, gun barrel alloys, and neck turned rounds until you admit it.

His heroes, the Swagger clan of Arkansas, routinely take apart entire squads of bad guys. Earl is deadly with fists or guns but doesn't need the guns unless he's taking on a dozen or more, while son--and master sniper--Bob Lee Swagger relies on his trusty and ever-present sniper rifle.

There is always the sense in Hunter's work that the narrative is barely tethered to reality, but, as in his last novel, Hot Springs, his writing skills and his inclusion of historic figures and factual accuracy manage to hold the line and keep the reader turning the pages. PALE HORSE COMING, however, slips its moorings, lifts off like a weather balloon over Roswell, and drifts right off into space.

Set in the 50s, this is Big Earl's show. Somewhere deep in the swamps of the Mississippi bayou (what would the world do without Mississippi when we need some really bad white guys) is Thebes State Prison, filled with the worst bunch of killers, spree killers, and serial killers known to man.

The problem is that the guys running the prison are even worse. The way Earl knows they are worse, see, is that they are mean to the killers, plus, when Earl breaks into the prison, they are mean to him. I know, I know, it is a little odd to break into prison, but take it up with Earl.

Anyway, Earl's job-you know he will accept it or there wouldn't be a book-is to see that justice is done by killing all the prison officers and freeing the criminals. Of course, that means the killers will be set free on the citizens of Mississippi, but that doesn't bother Earl, because his family lives in Arkansas.

So what Earl does is recruit some guys who no one ever heard of, but who are famous in the world of gun magazines (the fact that some of them are almost a hundred years old doesn't make any difference to Earl), plus Audie Murphy (don't ask me, the only reason I can figure is that Audie is dead so you can say anything you want about him and not get sued).

Since Audie is a rich, famous, movie star living in a big mansion with beautiful women surrounding him, you might think he would not be interested in risking his life in a swamp to help some guy from Arkansas he has never heard of kill a bunch of state employees. You are not Earl, though.

By now, Earl is no longer just a guy who can beat up anyone in a fight or kill whole platoons of armed men, he has become wiser than Dr Laura and Dr Phil put together. He just looks at Audie and says, "you're not happy are you?" Audie is so shocked that someone has finally been smart enough to see just how bad he has it, being a movie star and all, that he immediately throws it all over to go kill people with Earl.

Well, a bunch of stuff happens and events finally become so confused that Earl tells everyone how Billy the Kid took part in the Johnson County War, an event that occurred 30 years after Billy was shot dead by Pat Garrett, and in Wyoming, which has to be at least 1,000 miles from New Mexico.

"This is all just one big misunderstanding," Earl says at one point. My thoughts exactly.

Shooters who have read their work will recognize the real gun writers that Stephen Hunter patterns some of his characters after in this tale. Most are dead now, and at least one escapes me. Elmer Keith, Bill Jordan, Jack O'Connor, Ed McGivern, well-known gun writers and experts all, and Audie Murphy, actor and decorated warrior, are easily recognized by their physical descriptions, as well as the false names assigned to them, and in many cases their real-life predilections and stomping grounds fit the bill.

The character known as "Charlie" escapes me, but given his loud-mouthed bragging about how many men he has killed, I doubt that he is based on any real person at all. He does not fit anyone with whom I am familiar, and so I suspect that he is pure Hunter fiction. If not, he is lawsuit bait, and I hope I never meet his real-life counterpart.

This is another fine action thriller by Hunter using a couple of his protagonists from other stories, Earl Swagger, an Arkansas Marine, fresh out of WWII, and Sam Vincent, a former State Prosecutor.

This story, a little different from Hunter's usual fare, develops the old Yankee theme about the abysmal cruelties suffered by blacks in the deep South; in this case, Mississippi. Like most such tales, it is considerably overdrawn, and in fact a caricature of the real South, in which, in fact, I, an Oregonian, lived for a couple of years in the mid-'thirties. (By the way, Mr. Hunter, an accurate colloquial rendition of New Orleans in the local patois is more like Nyaw'luns, than the N'Awleens you seem to favor in this book, at least as I remember it from my youth).

I am awed by Stephen Hunter's genius when it comes to spinning a tale. Usually he does not let political correctness intrude and spoil the story. In this case he comes close, but the story survives. He knows more about firearms than the average fiction writer. Whether his knowledge is simply derived from reading gun magazines, or whether from some actual experience with firearms, it is difficult to tell. As for his knowledge of prisons and prison routine, I can tell you he has a lot to learn, speaking from twenty years experience on the subject.

What he describes here is a caricature about as accurate as a political cartoon compared to reality, even in the deep South of the 'thirties, where I saw my first chain gang working on a highway shoulder with balls and chains on their ankles under the shotgun of a cracker guard. But, this is a common fault of screenwriters as well. Most prison movies (Cool Hand Luke, The Longest Yard, The Shawshank Redemption, Escape From Alcatraz, etc., etc.), where the American public gets most of its information about prisons, unfortunately, tend to show the inmates as poor, misunderstood, or even innocent victims of the brutal "guards." It is disheartening to the men who work the toughest beat in law-enforcement to see themselves portrayed thus year after year, by Hollywood's mythmakers.

But, in this story at least. it all comes under the heading of "poetic license." There can be no doubt that Stephen Hunter is an exceptionally fine writer in his genre, who holds his audience spellbound. I love to read his stories, and hope he writes many more and lives a long, highly productive, successful life. I'm not even miffed by his cracks about the Navy (from Earl Swagger's mouth). I served with the Marines (TAD) for a year in China, even wore their uniform, and have great respect for them, myself.

Joseph (Joe) Pierre, USN (Ret)

Pale Horse Coming, one of Hunter's best, is definitely not for the faint of heart. It is replete with a plethora of stomach turning violence.

The story centers around the exploits of tempered steel tough Arkansas state trooper and Medal of Honor winner Earl Swagger and his father figure and Polk county prosecutor Sam Vincent. Vincent, a practicing attorney, gets a lucrative referral which takes him to the isolated backwoods Thebes State Penal Farm for Colored (the year is 1951) in Mississippi. Fearing for his safety he confides in Swagger who agrees to rescue him if he doesn't come home safely in a specfied amount of time. Thebes is run by a gang of racist, sadistic[s] ... who inflict relentless torture to the inmates. Vincent manages to become ensnared in the web of the prison farm and gets rescued by Swagger who himself gets captured. Swagger gets subjected to months of brutality and torture at the hands of the prison
guards headed by the notorious albino head sergeant known as Bigboy. With help from one of the aged trustees of the prison, Swagger manages to escape.

Swagger, determined to bring the whole system down recruits a group of aging gunfighters to mount an attack on the penal farm. What results is a story that is hard to put down. Hunter creates other storylines which result in some interesting twists as the story concludes.

Pale Horse Coming is a great Stephen Hunter novel, just like all others in the Swagger series. This one features Earl Swagger, just like his last one, Hot Springs. But Pale Horse Coming is better. From the jacket, you know the general plot of Earl destroying a prison. The first few pages had me hooked as the town and prison of Thebes is established to be an evil, mysterious place, and Earl's friend Sam agrees to go there to find a missing person.

The action picks up when Sam is arrested and Earl goes to find him. The rest of the plot is pretty straight forward without any surprising twists, but that doesn't mean there isn't any suspense. There are a few slow parts in the book, and those include Sam trying to find out the history of Thebes including all of its deep dark secrets. Some of this seems drawn out and predictible, yet not enough to slow the story down. The best parts were the scenes at the prison, where evil truly existed. Those parts made the climax that much greater, when you had a true sense of the evil Earl and his friends were fighting.

Now for a few random thoughts. Stephen Hunter isn't a racist, but in writing a period piece with racism as the primary force of evil, there are parts that are bound to be uncomfortable. So, any black person should be aware of the brutal treatment of the black prisioners and the frequent use of racial slurs. Perhaps the worst part is realizing that attitudes like this did exist, and perhaps still do.

Reading Amazon reviews is the only way I found out that all of the characters on Earl's posse were real-life gunmen. However, the name Audie Ryan did ring a bell. Just like in Hot Springs, Hunter used realife characters. I don't think it detracted from the story, because in this book, I had never heard of them.

In the climactic battle, Hunter writes with the belief that if you are a good gunman, you can defeat several people with your precise shooting alone. I think Hunter gives a good shooter too much credit. Other men with guns would probably get in a few kills now and then.

Finally, this is the fifth book in the Swagger series I believe, and the one that relates best to it is Black Light. In that book, Earl's son Bob Lee tries to figure out the mystery of his father's death. I know Hunter wrote Black Light several years ago. But if I remember right, Earl was killed rather easily considering the mayhem and death he survived in this book and Hot Springs. The Earl Swagger in this book would not have died so easily in Black Light. I may reread Black Light to see if my memory is correct.

I recommend all books in the Swagger series to anyone who enjoys Pale Horse Coming.

rating: 4.5 stars

With stephen hunter you know two things right off the bat: 1) the story will race along and 2) There will be lots of shooting. This book is no exception.

The plot is mentioned elsewhere so I won't belabor that point. And yes, the dialog at the end seems very 'old south' at times (or what I imagine it to be, being an australian and all)...Apart from that the bok grabs you by throat and doesn't let go. There are no slow patches or boring bits. This is an honest to god page turner (then why four-and half stars? for the dialog at times). And it's meaty enough to last more than a couple of hours.

Of course the main protagonist is the one and only Earl Swagger, and by god he's a man machine in this book. ABsolutely amazing. Poor earl get's himself in some real trouble trying to save his friend, a lawyer, hired to investigate the disapperance of somebody in Thebes, Mississipi...a prison farm of the worst sort (well, so he thinks anyway). Earl has to be the toughest he as ever been to survive this.

Without giving the story away let's just say that there are layers of plot of here, that are well developed, clever and lend the end a more poignant bang, than is typical. This story is quite satisifying just for the plot alone, without the action on top (that's just like chocolate syrup on the ice cream!).

So if you like Hunter, you like plot and characterization, and you don't mind Hunter's spin on 'the magnificent seven' and 'seven against thebes', you'll love this. Like I said, no slow bits, races along, has good action and Earl in the center of all things. And this is good. Only criticism: Bobby-lee doesn't get much of a part. Redeeming that to some extent (and totally cool as well): Audie Ryan...Sounds oddly like some other american with an irish name doesn't it???

Warning: this book will make 6+ hours of your life disappear if you're not careful! But it's a good way to lose 6+hours...

Enjoy!

See storyline above.

Stephen Hunter brings Earl Swagger back after his Hot Springs adventure. If you think Swagger had a tough time in Hot Springs, wait till you get a load of this story.
This time around Swagger is called on to help his friend Sam Vincent, an ex-prosecutor from Arkansas, who is being held captive at a secret Prison farm in Thebes, Arkansas. Thebes Prison Farm is run by ruthless men in the swamps of Mississippi. A subplot includes the investigation of a secret Army research project that ties in with the Farm.

Filled with surprises and evil twists, this violent and sometimes cruel look at life on the Farm, will make you race to the end of the story where you know justice will prevail. The gettin' even part will make you cheer.

Hunter fans will love this one. A Well plotted and well told thriller taking place in the racial turmoil of Mississippi in the 1950's.

Highly recommended

A Pale Horse Coming is simply a great story. It is entertaining, has an intriguing plot, and good character development. Written along the lines of the movie High Noon, Earl Swagger finds himself yet again in the world of bad men and evil times. His heroic ideals carry him through to a rousing conclusion. Is the story plausible? Probably not, but in the world of fiction anything is possible and a good tale is worth the read.
Deep in the swamps of Mississippi is a place where evil lives and men simply exist. Dark and brooding, At Thebes the laws of the jungle prevail while the men except their fate and simply live out their miserable lives. Into this horror stumbles Earl Swagger. Incarcerated, he barely endures and upon escape vows to return to put an end to Thebes State Penal Farm (colored). He does return and ends Thebes as only Earl Swagger can.
Excellent story and plot highlighting man's epic struggle against evil. Many twists and turns but in the end good prevails. Good character development in the continuing Earl Swagger saga.
Some graphic violence but germane to the story. No gratuitous violence, sex, or language.
Mr. Hunter is a master storyteller with a knack of keeping the reader involved. Although simplistic, his good versus evil writing style is refreshing in today's overly complex "shades of gray" world.
At 600 pages, Recommended for that long vacation where a little "good guys win" will be appreciated. I throughly enjoyed this book.