In the Rogue Blood - Hardcover

James Carlos Blake

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0380974924 ISBN 13: 9780380974924

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1997

Synopsis

Heading out to Texas to recover from their sister's murder and their father's alcoholism, brothers Edward and John Little find themselves on opposing sides during the Mexican-American War

About this title

About the Author:

James Carlos Blake was born in Mexico and raised in Texas. The most recent of his four novels is Red Grass River. His previous novels,In the Rogue Blood, received the LA Times Book Prize for Fiction. His short fiction has won awards and has appeared in a variety of literary journals. He lives in El Paso, Texas, and DeLand, Florida.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Blake (The Pistoleer, 1995, etc.) again demonstrates his talent for mingling historical fact with fiction, in the case here of the Mexican War and the antebellum frontier. Brothers John and Edward Little return to their remote north Florida farm from a search for their runaway sister only to find their father on a murderous rampage. The boys defend themselves and kill their father. Their mother, meanwhile, has fled. Left alone, the teenagers set out for Texas, but they become separated in New Orleans. John, who can't control his violent nature, kills a man and, to escape hanging, joins Zachary Taylor's Mexican Warbound army. Edward, in the meantime, also commits murder but flees to Texas and after several bloody adventures ends up in Mexico. He first joins a company of scalp-hunters, then takes up with a band of Mexican bandits who are ultimately impressed into US Service as the infamous Spy Company. For his part, John deserts the army and joins the St. Patrick's Brigade, composed of Americans (mostly Irishmen) fighting on the Mexican side. Shifting between the brothers' parallel stories, Blake offers a virtual encyclopedia of graphic violence. People are shot, clubbed, knifed, eviscerated, castrated, decapitated, impaled, flayed alive, hanged, scalped, dismembered, blown up, and immolated. And sexual perversions run the gamut from rape to sodomy to incest and necrophilia; only bestiality is omitted. Brutality and grotesque images are played out against invariably blood-red sunsets and dawns. Blake's assured prose, knowledge of history, and fast-paced story are definite pluses, but in its last third the complexities of the war and the redundancy of mind-numbing violence overwhelm the characters, finally rendering them rather absurd. (First printing of 25,000) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0380974924
• ISBN 13: 9780380974924
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 344