Review: Oregon Fight Club
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 12, 2014
One of the most difficult tricks for an author to pull off is to change the direction of a book completely in midstream without angering, confusing, or frustrating the audience. Dennis Yates accomplishes this difficult feat quite smoothly in "Red Mountain," a highly unusual and very imaginative thriller.The book's hero, Robert Crain is a seemingly ordinary guy living in a small, rural Oregon town, whose life is shattered when armed thugs kidnap his wife and stepson. He soon receives a most unusual demand from the kidnappers, that he fight a total stranger to the death at a location he will later be given. He also learns that his opponent-to-be is in the same boat as he is, trying to save his own loved ones who have been kidnapped.At this stage, after the first two chapters of the book, I thought I had a fairly good handle on the plot, and that this would be some sort of variant on underground fighting stories in which normal people are pitted each against each other for the amusement of jaded rich folks. I couldn't have been more wrong. My first inclination that I didn't have a handle on what was going on occurred when author Yates started inserting flashbacks in the book describing events that occurred in two separate time frames during the 1800s, one involving a homesteader who lived in the vicinity in the 1880s and the other involving a sailor turned bank robber who spent time there some years earlier. Normally, I'm a bit leery about revealing too many plot details about a book like this, but the book's blurb on Amazon and some of the other reviews strongly suggest that there's more going on than meets the eye. Let's just say that all the events are related, and in a way that's far from what readers were probably expecting.It would be very easy for a story like this to get bogged down in trying to keep the various plot threads moving with the end result being mass confusion. However, Yates pulls off his shifts in time, place, and point of view nearly effortlessly, gradually revealing bit by bit of the overall story and how all the characters and their stories intertwine. Towards the end of the book, Yates does go overboard a bit, and the introduction of one new set of characters late in the story doesn't quite work as well as his other plot twists. Still, however, the book recounts a fascinating saga that spans a century and a half.Despite the far reaching nature of the book and the numerous 19th century flashbacks, however, "Red Mountain" is ultimately the story of one man's attempt at survival. Yates does a good job of developing Crain's character through some well placed flashbacks into the more recent past. As he tries to rescue his family, Crain proves quite resourceful and determined, and there are a number of suspenseful scenes that are well handled. His wife Peggy proves to be quite a scrapper as well, helping him take on some rather nasty villains."Red Mountain" has a number of surprising plot developments that will keep readers interested the entire way. Needless to say, a book likes this requires a massive suspension of disbelief, but, if readers are willing to accept the book's central premise, the story proceeds rather logically and it's easy to follow for the most part. Dennis Yates has actually written a pretty good straightforward action adventure story and then done something quite remarkable. He has gone well beyond the action tale most readers probably expected and expanded the book with some highly imaginative plot developments into something that's quite memorable.