Redeye ~ A Capsule Book Review

Redeye ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

The “Redeye” in Redeye is a dog. He belongs to a bounty hunter named Cobb Pittman. Cobb Pittman carries Redeye in a bag hanging from his saddle. Redeye has just one eye. The eye that he doesn’t have is red, making people think he’s some kind of a devil dog. He’s vicious when he needs to be, latching on to the nose with his teeth of any unfortunate animal that riles him. He can also latch on to the nose of a man if he wants to.

Redeye is set in Colorado in the 1890s, making it a “western.” There’s not much plot to speak of, mostly just a collection of quirky characters doing quirky things. In the small Colorado town of Mumford Rock, Billy Blankenship and P.J. Copeland are businessman and entrepreneurs. They have learned embalming in Denver, apparently in a very short time, and hope to open a mortuary parlor in the town of Mumford Rock. To show the dangers of a body that has not been embalmed, they arrange to have the body of a dead Chinaman “explode” at the train station. This will scare people, they believe, into viewing embalming as a necessity.

Near Mumford Rock are cliff dwellings that were occupied by Indians hundreds of years ago. The cliff dwellings are on a mesa, nearly inaccessible, so there are still Indian “artifacts” left behind. P.J. Copeland sees the commercial possibilities inherent in the artifacts. If he can mount an expedition that can bring back a lot of the artifacts, tourists will pay money to see them. Hold on a minute, though! The U.S. government already has plans for those artifacts. Wouldn’t you just know it?

P.J. Copeland and company have already brought back two mummies, one of a woman and one of a baby. His superannuated mother, Grandma Copeland, believes the baby mummy is one of her long-lost children and won’t part with it. Some of the more dimwitted of the bunch try to bring the woman mummy back to life by wiring an electrical charge to her heart (or the place where her heart would have been). It sets her on fire.

Star Copeland, niece of P.J. Copeland, is new to the West, having just come to Colorado from South Carolina after the death of her dear mama. She learns the ways of the West quickly enough and falls in love with a young, tubercular Englishman named Andrew Collier, who is in Colorado studying Indian culture. While cavorting with Andrew Collier, Star also fields an offer of marriage from an oft-married Mormon, Bishop Thorpe. (In the 1890s, the Mormons had to follow U.S. law on marriage, meaning one wife for each man.)

There’s a subplot in Redeye involving Mormons and the massacre of a wagon train of settlers from Arkansas that occurred in 1857, some thirty-five years earlier. A group of Mormons using Indian wiles attacked a wagon train of pioneers near Salt Lake City, killing all of them. Orders from Brigham Young, the Mormon leader, were to leave none of the settlers alive to tell what happened. One of the Mormons instrumental in the attack was a man named Calvin Boyle, who, all those years later, is living under an assumed named, Bishop Thorpe. (He’s the same Bishop Thorpe who proposes to Star Copeland.) It seems that the bounty hunter Cobb Pittman has been trailing Bishop Thorpe, unknown to anybody else, for years to make him pay for his part in the massacre.

In Redeye, Clyde Edgerton, one of my favorites writers, uses the literary technique used by William Faulkner to great effect in his novel As I Lay Dying, that of allowing each character to speak in his or her own voice. That makes for a fast-paced, entertaining, easy-to-read book. You can read this book without expending too much brain power and have fun while you’re doing it. What’s more fun than mummies?

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997

Something Wicked This Way Comes ~ A Capsule Book Review

Something Wicked This Way Comes ~ A Capsule Book Review by Allen Kopp

A carnival comes to a small Illinois town in October. Carnivals don’t usually come after Labor Day, but this carnival is different. It’s Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show. It’s been in business for hundreds of years, traveling around from place to place, feeding on people’s sorrow, despair and tears. It makes empty promises and gets unhappy, sorrowful people to give up their souls. And what do these people get in exchange for their souls? They get NOTHING! You’d be surprised how easy it is to get some people to give up everything for nothing.

Mr. Dark is also known as the Illustrated Man. He’s the driving force behind the carnival. Every inch of his body is covered with tattoos of sinister creatures that move (or seem to move). Mr. Cooger, the other owner of the carnival, doesn’t have much to say. He has ridden on the carousel that makes people younger as it goes backward and older as it goes forward. When we see him, he might be a tiny child or he might be over two hundred years old. But, wait a minute! Isn’t Mr. Cooger also Mr. Electrico, the man who has been cooked in the electric chair as part of the show? One never seems to know about Mr. Cooger.

There’s a Mirror Maze in the carnival that, when people enter, sucks the souls right out of them. Once you enter the mirror maze, you may never be the same again, or you might not come out at all. There are freaks whose distorted bodies reflect their sins; a calliope that plays music backwards; big tents, sideshows, cotton candy and everything else you’d expect from a carnival.

Jim Nightshade and Will Halloway are inseparable friends living next door to each other. They are not quite fourteen, one of them having been born one minute before midnight on Halloween and the other one minute after. They are very much alike except that Jim’s personality is “dark” and Will’s is “light.” They are drawn to the unusual carnival and right away they know, or think they know, its sinister intentions.

Will’s father, Charles Halloway, is an old man, fifty-four, janitor at the library. He likes working nights at the library when nobody is there. He is an unusual kind of father, philosophical and understanding. He reads some books on the subject of evil when he is alone at night in the library and uncovers information about carnivals such as Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show. He realizes that Jim and Will, and other people in the town, are in danger. Mr. Dark wants their souls. The carnival loves all things “dark,” but if there’s anything it hates it’s laughter and happiness: a simple thing that might be enough to make the carnival move on. You can’t have any souls in this town. Of course, laughter and happiness won’t put the carnival out of business; all it has to be is move someplace else where laughter and happiness don’t exist.

Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury, was first published in 1962. Its language is nearly poetic, a little overblown at times, with a sometimes tiresome stream of metaphors, as shown in this passage where Jim and Will first encounter Mr. Dark: This second man was tall as a lamp post. His pale face, lunar pockmarks denting it, cast light on those who stood below. His vest was the color of fresh blood. His eyebrows, his hair, his suit were licorice black, and the sun-yellow gem which stared from the tie pin thrust in his cravat was the same unblinking shade and bright crystal as his eyes.

Something Wicked This Way Comes is a story of good versus evil, dark versus light, happiness versus sadness, one of the seminal works of dark fantasy that has influenced a whole generation of writers. So, if you are the kind of person who can always find something to be unhappy about (I’ve known a few of these), you are making yourself more susceptible to evil, and the boogeyman (or Mr. Dark) might just come and snatch away your soul.

Copyright © 2018 by Allen Kopp

by allen0997