BookLife

Bad Boys by Frank Roderus opens with a man about to tell the woman he loves about his wild and rowdy past.  The novel ends…  well, it ends where it needs to end.  In between, the story ranges, in tone and content, from the romping good times of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to the more mature The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the picaresque tales of highwaymen and outlaws.  The prose is fast, tight, and as clear as spring water.  Each chapter moves deeply into the life of the central character, Danny Southern, and then moves on with only the faintest hint of sentimentality and a steady maturation.

At the three-quarters mark, dread sets in—not simply because of some impending doom, but because it becomes increasingly hard to deny that the story will soon end.  It’s hard to stop reading Bad Boys—hard to put it down while in you’re reading it and hard to accept that it’s over when you finish.
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An anthology is different than a single author collection of stories in the same way that a dinner party is different than dinner for two.  An anthology need not be a raucous affair, with tail-coats and lamp-shades, or broken glass and loud music.  It need not be a New Year’s blow-out or a July Fourth picnic with fire-works.  But, at the very least, it ought to be fun.

Express Westerns’ A Fistful of Legends edited by Nik Morton and Charles T. Whipple does get pretty rowdy.  This anthology of “21 New Tales of the Old West” is very much a celebration of the short form Western.  Not only is it filled with great stories well told, it’s is also filled with… exuberance.
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Why do I like Westerns so much?  Why do Western stories—the characters, the settings, the situations, the writing styles, the tropes—resonate so profoundly with me?  Anthologies like Express Westerns’ A Fistful of Legends edited by Nik Morton and Charles T. Whipple always get me thinking about the power of Western fiction.  Legends came out in 2009 and contains 21 original Western stories.

In his introduction to the anthology, novelist (and legend) James Reasoner speaks lovingly of the Western’s “tremendous power to entertain” and its “universality”:

You can tell any sort of story as a Western: comedy, tragedy, action, romance. You can pit man against nature, man against his fellow man, man against himself – or woman against herself, since strong female characters have been a tradition in Westerns going back decades…

In many ways, the Western genre remains as boundless and new as the Western frontier once was.  Just west of that ridge, as it were, anything is possible.  And as a result, the genre, like the characters and settings at its core, is larger than life.
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