By the Gun: Six from Richard Matheson (An Evans Western) - Hardcover

Matheson, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0871317478 ISBN 13: 9780871317476

Publisher: M Evans & Co, 1994

Synopsis

The best of the West comes vividly to life in a collection of six of the finest Western stories by an acclaimed writer who specializes in his presentations of lone men fighting powerful forces.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly:

Though best known as a grandmaster of horror, Matheson is also a noted writer of westerns ( The Gunfight ) . This volume reprints four of his early sagebrush yarns--two short stories and two novellas--and presents two original stories. Matheson's trademarks are in evidence: the senseless but seemingly inevitable violence and brutality, the quickness and finality of death, a melancholy feeling of hopelessness, taut plotting and convincing dialogue. The best entry is the opening novella, "Gunsight," in which an aging lawman hides his growing blindness with the help of a local doctor. It's only in this work, the collection's oldest, that Matheson allows a hopeful, if ambiguous, ending, in which the hero is allowed to triumph and survive. Elsewhere, spirals of violence spin toward all-too-logical conclusions. In "Go West, Young Man" a kid from the East comes to the frontier to pursue a bloody dream, only to have his new life end before it's begun. "Boy in the Rocks" deals with a range war that needn't have occurred, while one of the new pieces, "Of Death and Thirty Minutes," laconically tells of a hostage situation with eerily modern overtones. Some of the early work reflects an author still polishing his craft, with genre cliches and hackneyed phrases marring the the prose and plotting.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

These six beautifully crafted short stories by a superb writer (Gunfight, LJ 3/15/93) feature guns of the Old West and the people who used them. Included are stories of a sheriff who is going blind yet fights to keep his town the most peaceful one in the state, a 16-year-old boy who kills to save his little herd of 50 cows, and a crazed gunman shooting up a saloon who is stopped dead by a young woman and a derringer. A book to keep and to cherish.
Sister Avila, Acad. of the Holy Angels, Minneapolis
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: M Evans & Co
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0871317478
• ISBN 13: 9780871317476
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 171