Westerns worth a read

I am reading my first good western novel in some time.

There appears to be a kind of western where you have a main character who either rambles on through a series of far fetched though somewhat historically accurate landscape and narrative, encountering entertaining characters and as often as not picking them up like tumbleweeds and evolving into an outlandish travelling caravan jostling from one near call to the next. The one I’m reading right now is Edwin Shrake’s first novel, Custer’s Brother’s Horse. An unwieldly title but an enthralling tale.

Rather a real central character we have a few that cross paths and end up on the run. Set in the days just after the Civil War when some discontented still roamed the land causing grief, we have one near sociopathic Confederate officer making his way back to his mother, who in her previous life was a noted actress back in London. After nearly being strung up due to running into an old enemy, a product of a generational family feud, and in the process bonding with a British world wise novelist, who has just been accused of stealing Custer’s brother’s horse (hence the title), who of course had the hots for his mother back home, the two find themselves released by a scenery chewing judge but then on the run after a young mulatto woman from New Orleans ends up killing one of the guards meant to escort them to the county line, the now cold guard having been set on rape. They end up running from Custer’s maniacal brother and the grudge holding Leatherwood family, eventually adding a Spanish lady to their company, etc. etc.etc.

As blurbed on the book “this is a western like Cold Mountain is a western”. All I know is I cannot stop reading this book.

Other standout westerns for me have been, yes, Cold Mountain, Little Big Man, the Berrybender Narratives by Larry McMurtry, and Ron Hansen’s Assassination of Jesse James and Desperados. And of course, the Cormac McCarthy Hemingway westerns, as well as his earlier works.