Review: Re-Revised Review: `One of the big three-- Zane Gray, Louis L'Amour, and Van Holt.'
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 10, 2014
RE-REVISED REVIEW: Reading another Van Holt Western is like have that extra piece of cake or pie or donut or whatever indulges your fancy. As said before, `Spaghetti westerns in both cinematic and literary formats have long been a favorite with readers: they take adventure on a man to man level to the maximum without the need for intervention by aliens or comic book hero types. If my count is correct Van Holt has penned thirty-six gun-fighting novels (seems his actual count of books written is around sixty, the others being adventures outside of the Old West). So here is another inimitable western yarn, but this book deserves extra attention. I'll let the author explain why from the Intro to THE HELL RIDERS:`This book seems to be about racism in the old West, but is really about other things. Racism is often the scapegoat for many other problems. And of course the politically correct fanatics have discovered that they can not only control the way we talk, but even the way we think by making some words seem too horrible to be allowed to enter the minds of normal right-thinking people..... This old western was written in longhand almost thirty years ago. I wouldn't write it at all now, but most of it seemed too good to throw away. So I decided to get rid of the controversial word whenever possible.....In this strange western, the man called Gatten doesn't shoot the black man off the hotel balcony because he's black, but because he was trying to shoot Gatten through the window of his room.' Direct quote (excerpted) from this book, this!Gatten, or so the townsfolk called him, is a typical Van Holt character: he came a long way and endured patience to right some old wrongs and give the wrongdoers the dose of lead they needed. The players include Col. Easton and his `young wife', the black man Gatten's shoots, the `hell riders' who pursue Gatten, and the twists and turns after Easton dies leaves behind the beautiful but evil widow how stirs the pot of vengeance. It is another walloping rendering of the flavor of the Old West, and with Van Holt churning out these books we will thankfully never tire of the tales he creates. Grady Harp, April 14