Redeye - Hardcover

Edgerton, Clyde

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1565120604 ISBN 13: 9781565120600

Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1995

Synopsis

A New York Times Notable Book. Hang on to your ten gallon hats--Clyde Edgerton has taken his eye for detail, his ear for humor, and his nose for the odor of religious hypocrisy to the Wild West. In REDEYE, he leads us back to turn-of-the-century Colorado, where a motley crew of innocents and scoundrels, visionaries and vultures, tells us How the West Was Made Safe for Free Enterprise. "A Hollywood pitchman might call REDEYE Eudora Welty meets Mark Twain. An admirer of good fiction might say that Clyde Edgerton has combined structure, character, and style to create a small gem of a novel."--New York Times Book Review.

About this title

About the Author

Clyde Edgerton is the author of eight novels, five of which have been New York Times Notables. He is a professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and performs with his band, Rank Strangers. Author Web site—www.clydeedgerton.com.

From Publishers Weekly

The redoubtable Edgerton jauntily plumbs new territory in this tall-tale sixth novel (after In Memory of Junior), departing from the South that was the setting of his previous books. The wilds of southern Colorado in the 1890s are home to his cast of transplanted Carolinians, a quirky bunch whose antics have much in common with those of their brethren in Edgerton's other books. The Copeland family has come west to Mumford Rock en masse, led by P.J. (Pleasant James), a newly licensed embalmer with big ideas. His ambitions are abetted by shifty Billy Blankenship, who plans to turn the cliff dwellings at Mesa Largo into the forerunner of Disney World. Together they engage in some highly questionable commercial ventures, encountering en route an oddly matched group of Western frontiersmen, renegade Mormons, a pair of alcoholic Indians, an aristocratic young English scholar and an obsessive bounty hunter and his mixed-breed "catchdog" named Redeye. Artfully using a kaleidoscopic sequence of first-person vignettes and shifting the narrative voice among this ragtag crew, Edgerton larks along from one outrageous incident to another, beginning with a plan to explode the corpse of a dead "Chinaman" on the platform of the train depot. Lurking on the fringe is the dog-owning bounty hunter intent on wreaking vengeance on the Mormons responsible for an infamous (real) 1892 shootout with a wagon train of pioneers. By the time Redeye narrates his own version of events, we believe every word. Fun from start to finish, this tale should go on building sales right through Christmas.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 1565120604
• ISBN 13: 9781565120600
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 252