Contents:
He rescues his younger brother, Boyd, from his foster family, and they cross to Mexico again to recover the horses. The Crossing gains more interest after Boyd is wounded in a skirmish with authorities that causes him to become a kind of folk hero. In the meantime, Billy encounters another grand speechifier: He said that he could stare down the sun and what use was that? He took up the bulb and gently washed the wound and swabbed it and took up the silver nitrate stick and gently touched it in the wound.
He worked from the top of the wound downward. Eventually, Boyd absconds with his lover and Billy returns to the U. In a mordant development, Boyd is remembered by ordinary Mexicans, somewhat erroneously, as a champion of the people. Based on his public utterances, McCarthy is, politically, some kind of Burkean conservative, but he is plainly fascinated by Mexico as a country where revolutionary and populist hopes remained alive well into the 20th century; that he shows radical memory to be a faulty one, creating heroic episodes from chapters of accident, reads to me less as a bitter satire on the radical imagination than as the wistful lament of a disappointed idealist.
From a certain perspective one might even hazard to say that the great trouble with the world was that that which survived was held in hard evidence as to past events. A false authority clung to what persisted, as if those artifacts of the past which had endured had done so by some act of their own will.
Yet the witness could not survive the witnessing. In the world that came to be that which prevailed could never speak for that which perished but could only parade its own arrogance. It pretended symbol and summation of the vanished world but was neither. He said that in any case the past was little more than a dream and its force in the world greatly exaggerated.
The novel stops more than ends, back in America. It ends, after a vision of a misshapen dog that at long last reprises, most bitterly, the wolf theme, when Billy finally, after hundreds of pages of suffering, weeps. All the Pretty Horses is a perfect novel of its kind, structurally anyway, so it is perhaps unfair to compare The Crossing to it.
Yet so much that is there in the first novel of the trilogy is missing from the second, including character motivation, thematic coherence, and historical grounding. This long "lecture" -- the first of many -- follows the breakneck opening sequence, and is disconcerting indeed. Take away the tiresome talking and educating -- where did McCarthy get the idea that he needed a device as transparent as a blind man to share the wisdom that the world "moves in eternal darkness"? That's why the first section of the book is the most moving and most powerfully rendered.
When he finds the pathetic creature in a trap, he impetuously decides to go across the border on horseback and set her free. As readers of "All the Pretty Horses" know, crossing into Mexico spells disaster for McCarthy's characters, and what happens to the wolf teaches Billy a bitter lesson about good intentions.
Once again McCarthy displays the transcendent, almost otherworldly empathy he has for animals, one of the hallmarks of "Pretty Horses. Returning home to find that an appalling tragedy has befallen his family during his absence, Billy takes his enigmatic younger brother Boyd back with him to Mexico to exact revenge. Aug 27, Debra marked it as to-read Shelves: Stephen King recommended author and book.
He is, quite simply, one of the best in the business. Have you read it? Probably Jack Ketchum, the outlaw horror writer whose terrifying first novel is finally available uncut from Overlook Connection Press. That would be Off Season: If you read it on Thanksgiving, you probably won't sleep until Christmas. Don't say your uncle Stevie didn't warn you heh-heh-heh.
The book is fiercely written, though it contains nothing in the way of plot twists or surprises. At just over a hundred pages, though, the story never gives you the chance to get bored. Western de terror realista, muy crudo y visceral, como es habitual en el autor. Es una novela cortita pero intensa, intensa, intensa!
Me ha horrorizado, maravillado, interesado, apasionado Voy a leer el siguiente sin duda. Nov 20, Perry rated it really liked it. Makes a strong B-side to Zahler's Wraiths of the Broken Land, as far as ultra-violent potentially mystical sex slavery exploitation pulp westerns go. There was an article published recently about the pointlessness of the violence portrayed in this year's darling at the movies, The Revenant.
I saw the movie, and didn't think much of it, but the article helped me realize why: I've given up on horror movies over the last ten years or so, too, since they're now more about shock than scare, but I still re There was an article published recently about the pointlessness of the violence portrayed in this year's darling at the movies, The Revenant. I've given up on horror movies over the last ten years or so, too, since they're now more about shock than scare, but I still read a lot of disturbing fiction, because it's easier to stomach that sort of thing in a book than in a movie.
That's a large part of why I haven't given up on reading all of Ketchum's work, despite the pointlessness to a lot of his violence, as well. I think a distinction has to be made, though, between gratuitous and necessary when judging the amount of violence in any given medium. In The Crossings, the violence is understated at least in terms of Ketchum , but there's a scene near the end of the novel that stands out as an example of that heartless, pointless brutality that populates so much of the author's work. Ketchum rarely shows us that intimate brutality without making it necessary to understand his characters; in this novella, he uses it to showcase the brutality of the enemies, but also to highlight the strengths of those who witness it.
It's very necessary for their motivations, their character growth, and the plot, so it doesn't count as gratuitous, disturbing as it is. The Crossings is a western story, which at first seemed like an odd choice for Ketchum to write. Then I realized that a lot of his work shows to what lengths people will go when their boundaries and limits are removed, and the Old West is a place where that happened quite a bit. In Ketchum's world, the genre intersected nicely with his usual style of fiction. Reading all of Ketchum's work at once like I've been doing hasn't been easy. I keep returning to this dark, depraved world of his, and over time, it gets exhausting.
His stories have a compelling nature that makes it difficult to stop reading them, in part to see what happens next, but also because the reader holds out a touch of hope for things to get better. Ketchum doesn't always give it to us, but when he does, it makes the rest of the events easier to comprehend. Ketchum's other novellas have felt like lesser stories, but The Crossings is better developed overall than his other shorter works.
For once, the story didn't feel to short, as neither the plot nor the characters received short shrift here. It's not a place I would recommend fans of dark fiction to start with Ketchum, but for those readers who have cut their teeth on his other fiction and are looking for another dive into that darkness, The Crossings is a good choice.
Sep 14, Anthony Giordano rated it liked it. Even though this novella is riddled with tropes and predictable scenarios, the setting is a scorching painting of the Old West; and the characters, familiar as they may be, still elicit a sympathetic emotional investment from the reader. What I am guessing most people expect from Ketchum is brutal, visceral action and shocking sexual situations.
On both fronts, prepare to be satisfied. Blood streams forth in rapid streams, and some sexual boundaries are pushed. And yet, there is something missing here. Like a finely sculpted chocolate Easter Bunny that you find out after biting into it that it is hollow.
As likable as the characters are, there is just as strong a lack of depth about them. The abysmal fathoms of Hart's inner loss is never charted, the testing of Hart's purity against the horrors he sees before him is not truly contrasted, and there is no tempering of Mother Knuckles' inner softness with the potential destructiveness of his physical bearing.
This failing is felt even more so on the side of the villains.
In a story where the good guys teeter on the side of being cardboard cutouts, the bad guys should have a chance to run carte blanche with their wicked whims. Not so much here.
The parameters set for Paddy Ryan and the Valenzura Sisters leave endless potential for depravity and plain, nasty old evil, but it isn't optimized. Instead, we get some fairly linear action scenes. But nothing to make us feel as though these are the very real bogeymen that frighten even our adult souls. Holden is the face of terror, while Ryan is just a terrifying face.
More on that later.
Estos veteranos malviven en Arizona buscando Mustangs desperdigados y perdidos por los soldados asi como sus descendientes ya salvajes, para domarlos y sacarse unos duros. Mi primer experiencia con este autor ha sido mas que grata. Es un verdadero maestro de la narrativa, logra contar una historia solida y espeluznante en poco mas de paginas.
Un mezcla perfecta de western con terror. Feb 06, David S. I've been waiting around 10 years to read this book.