The Winter Family by Clifford Jackman

 

High summer night in Oklahoma. Warm winds that smelled of apple blossoms. Now and then a lightning bug winked on and drifted through the air. Quentin Ross caught one in his fist and held it there, with its radiance leaking between his fingers and reflecting in his shallow eyes. For a moment he rolled the lightning bug between his thumb and forefinger, and then he crushed it, smearing himself with its luminescence, and he smiled, wide and empty.

That opening passage lets you know that we are outside the bounds of the formulary Western; we are sojourning in the squalid landscape of many an uber-violent neo-Western.

Admittedly, this is a brand of the genre I can enjoy a good bit.

This 2015 Western crosses the border into McCarthy’s Blood Meridin territory, where also resides James Carlos Blake’s superb In the Rogue Blood and S. Craig Zahler’s also transgressively enjoyable Congregation of Jackals.

All of the titles mentioned have been reviewed on these pages, quite favorably.

The trouble is, this novel is so reminiscent of those without quite reaching that balancing tone of high art and rough violence that with each brief chapter I would continually think of the comparison novels.

While there is nothing wrong with this novel, there may be information in the fact that this reader continued to think of other novels while reading this one.

It strikes me as an unfair review on my part and my failing in that I could never quite settle into the dark territories Mr. Jackman had to offer without thinking about former trips into this territory that I enjoyed.

The dilemma of being on vacation while thoughts of past enjoyable vacations persistently intrude.

Make of this what you will.