The Hour of Lead by Bruce Holbert
My rating: 5/5 cats
another brilliantly-written and unapologetically brutal addition to the grit lit category.
this one covers about seventy years of circumstances, it starts out bleak without ever letting up, and its second movement ends with one of the most infuckingsanely blood-drenched scenes i have ever read.
you know who you are.
this is a book that unflinchingly explores the mythos of the west: the violence and the loneliness, the stoicism and the self-imposed exile, the comfort of work and the weight of the personal code. it’s about lives endured instead of lived, in a time when men were men and women were… not well off.
it’s about a terrible snowstorm in 1918 washington, during which a chain of events is set into motion that will have unimaginably explosive consequences further down the road than any of its participants dare even conceive. it’s about the separate trajectories of two dangerous men, their lives overlapping and echoing at crucial intervals, destined to meet under violent circumstances, and the women and children in the path of their inevitable showdown.
it’s about a lot of suffering, a lot of blood. and it reads like this:
The air had cooled and stringy clouds rose from the dogs’ mouths, together gathering into a fog that made them look like demons in a moor. Some barked and others howled; still more nipped one another in their anxiety. The cooking meat stirred their stomachs and they leaped to break the ridgeline, stout horses and good hemp rope knotted on a pair of saddle horns all that held them.
Some below glanced at the animals but dismissed them. Animals were drawn to a meal that didn’t require the effort of killing. They would all be scavengers if circumstances permitted. People differed little, Matt realized; most would eat a beef steak or chicken leg, skinned and plucked and cut and papered and piled into their freezers or root cellars rather than kill and butcher for themselves. For a man civility seemed the ladder out of the melee; otherwise, like his animal brethren, a man only survives. Straight up killers seemed more moral, though. They turned lives into food knowing the flesh their teeth ground and their tongues savored and their gullets swallowed breathed an hour or a day or a minute before. The recognized their own existence was constructed upon slaughter, and the debt they owed their victims could never be repaid, simply owed. It seemed to Matt, though the meals arrived on porcelain and cooked, the scene below was no less savage.
it’s my favorite kind of book, perfectly executed. get on this one, country-noir friends o’mine.
