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Young heroine Shy South sets off on a quest for revenge to recover her kidnapped brother and sister, along the way hopping through a series of western set pieces in which Abercrombie can have fun asking “what would a gold rush town in a fantasy world be like?” Abercrombie is very skilled at delivering the kind of thunderous, violent climax both westerns and fantasy fans expect, and Red Country does not disappoint.
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Red Country continues Abercrombie’s quest to mash every other genre into fantasy, and the result lands somewhere between Charles Portis’s True Grit and the John Milius movie of Conan the Barbarian. “What if the wise old wizard is actually a dextrous con artist who leads the hero on a false quest?” is the kind of question an Abercrombie fantasy toys with. To coin a pretentious but accurate term, Abercrombie is a “post-fantasist”, a writer who grew up immersed in Tolkien, Moorcock and Dungeons and Dragons, and who can’t resist poking at the boundaries of the genre he clearly also loves. Abercrombie has courted the title of Lord Grimdark, but that somewhat obscures the more interesting aspects of his work. Joe Abercrombie’s Red Country is a weird western set in the same world as his First Law fantasy trilogy, although the connection is perhaps a little manufactured. Jon Shannow is the loner anti-hero to end all loner outsider heroes, and while Wolf in Shadow is lesser known than The Dark Tower, it is a far more accurate take on the western, a genre Gemmell clearly adored. King’s series undoubtedly influenced David Gemmel’s 1987 weird western, The Wolf in Shadow. Few among even King’s most hardcore fans would claim The Dark Tower his greatest work, but its blend of western imagery with fantasy quest story is, at times, hypnotic. The Dark Tower series, which now stands at eight volumes, is the story of gunslinger Roland Deschain and his quest to reach the titular tower. Stephen King, the master of rejuvenating pulp plotlines for today’s reader, can make a strong claim to owning the weird western as well. So it seems almost inevitable that over time the western and the fantasy have cross-bred. Like sci-fi and fantasy authors, writers of westerns, even when their sales stretch into millions, remain at the margins of mainstream culture. The pre-eminent western author, Louis L’Amour, loved the mythology so deeply that he began to write novels as a way of escaping into it. Both are fantasy worlds, abstracted from reality, crafted by expert fantasists. The world of the western is about as historically accurate about 19th-century America as the world of the Shire in Lord of the Rings is about pre-industrial England. A former chip shop owner, Edson developed a love of escapist fantasy in his youth, and approached writing westerns just as he later approached writing sci-fi.
JT Edson, who died in 2014, wrote more than 137 novels, most of them westerns, and claimed in all seriousness “never to have even been on a horse”. It’s a little-known fact that one of the all-time bestselling writers of westerns lived most of his life in the English market town of Melton Mowbray.