The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career

"I am not the revolution...I am the instrument of another hand." So does Francisco "Pancho" Villa begin the tale of his rise from thief to warlord to the revolutionary leader of northern Mexico. By turns a confession and an act of seduction, The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career chronicles a country remaking itself through blood and violence, giving shape to the boy who would dare to step from anonymity into power through the inexorable force of his will.

An exile at 16 after the murder of his family's landowner, Villa begins a journey through dusty desert villages and barren mountaintop camps where his principles are formed and tested by endemic injustice. Building a group of outlaws around him, Villa begins to wage a war on the landowning dons that control the state, but as the savagery increases and the betrayals multiply, the ascension within Villa's command of the mysterious and sadistic Rodolfo Fierro puts Villa's ideals, and his vision of the future of Mexico, to the test.

Luminous, disturbing and powerful, The Beginning of His Excellent and Eventful Career weaves history and drama into a driving tale of ambition and brutality, insisting that those who would remake the world must first set fire to the old.

The Beginning of His Excellent & Eventful Career is a fully realized novel about the Mexican revolution and Francisco “Pancho” Villa, the man who began it all. Cameron MacKenzie’s knowledge of Mexican history is ex- traordinary. So is his ability to weave that history into a fictional tapestry that reads as a novel should ... as fast as Pancho Villa’s galloping horse. This is a remarkable debut by a remarkable writer.

—Pablo Medina, author of Cubop City Blues

Cameron MacKenzie has fused historical narrative with first-person memoir and the result is a tremendously compelling (and terrifying) amalgamation—part historical novel, part soliloquy, part sadistic bandit’s bildungsroman.... melds myth and legend, memoir and fiction to create an astounding psychological portrait of Villa ... theater of cruelty meets American Psycho.... MacKenzie doesn’t soften the terrible facts of history ... gives us the internal theater of the Mexican Revolution—ghastly cruelty, exuberant violence.... Villa’s psychological journey is a map governed by the facts of history. The result is a memoir that sounds like a war lord’s confession ... a significant and troubling achievement ...that allows for a gripping read.

—Marion Wrenn, co-editor, Painted Bride Quarterly

... captures the frenzy and ferocity of a time of great turmoil. Cameron MacKenzie expertly reworks the Mexican Revolution into a fast-paced, first-person narrative of cinematic vividness....

—Alexander Pepple, Editor, Able Muse

... a novel that elicits equal parts jealousy and fascination.... MacKenzie has mastered the art of the sentence, each self-contained and threatening violence.... taps into the universality of the human experience and in an ethnically fluid narrative. A truly brilliant work.

—Tim Fitts, author of Hypothermia