Title: Oh, You Tex!
Author: William MacLeod Raine
Cover artist: Roswell Keller
Yours for: $8
Best things about this cover:
- What the Hell is Happening!?!?! The perspective ... it's hurting ...
- "Chief Green Jeans was sunning himself on a rock, when all of a sudden ...!"
- I want to say that that woman was *clearly* photo-shopped into this picture, but ...
- This is like an abstract expressionist painting, with occasional humanesque figures.
- Fear hand!
- I do not quite get the punctuation of the title. "Oh, You Tex!" Is she ungrammatically affirming that that is his name? Is she calling him a "Tex" the way you might call some a "Brute" or "Bastard?" Is she excited to learn that he texts, but, like your mom, doesn't quite know the right word for it?
- William MacLeod Raine wrote the hell out of some westerns. His books are Everywhere in used pb shops.
Best things about this back cover:
- There are sexier names for a dame than "Wadley."
- Apparently there is no good synonym for "gun-play," so they just went ahead and used it twice. Sorry, just looked at the front cover—make that three times. Oh wait, I see, the front blurb is just a barely changed version of the last line on the back cover. Don't break your backs trying to be original, guys.
Page 123~
Cowboys left their partners standing in the middle of the floor. The musicians dropped their bows and fiddles. Bartenders left unfilled the orders they had just taken.The cause? The Rapture! Just kidding. It's injuns.
~RP
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter]
8 comments:
Campest title ever! Brilliant.
Unabridged. Thank heaven!
Fabulous! I bet you hear all the time that your fans gawk the cover and try to guess what you'll say. I do, and I never come close to how funny and sharp it is. Yes, the perspective *hurts*.
Spoilers much on that back cover? I mean, that's basically the Cliff's Notes version of the book there, isn't it?
"Bad men and the wild free life of the West" with lots and lots of "gun-play" thrown in? Annie Proulx, eat your heart out!
I feel as if I've already read the entire book based on that astonishingly-detailed blurb on the back.
And, baby, that Wadley family is just bad news.
Like Rex noted, William MacLeod Raine was a prolific Western writer.
I doubt very many people these days have heard of him though. That's what makes these type of blogs so great- they bring back some big names from the past that have been forgotten.
Layson
The helter-skelter perspective we behold is actually the first recorded glimpse of a mountain's back being broken.
"Oh, you Tex!" is Chief Budgie Feather's cheerfully amused rejoinder to suddenly realising who it is that's just been playfully inserting their 'gun barrel' up his 'windswept space'.
And the reason Tex was 'in trouble - but deep!' was because the beating his boss's son'd received was to his meat.
No wonder poor Ramona's reaching towards her eyes to tear them out even as she allows the landslide cover to bury her alive.
Post a Comment