Pale Horse Coming

This is the first book I've read by Mr. Hunter. This book set in the 1950's down south. The racial descriptions seem true to me and that's what made it hard to really get started on this book. It does go fast with some twist and turns. The ending was a bit drawn out, but I liked it. Definitely have to read more from this author.

A Pale Horse Coming is simply a great story. It is entertaining, has an intriguing plot, and good character development. Written along the lines of the movie High Noon, Earl Swagger finds himself yet again in the world of bad men and evil times. His heroic ideals carry him through to a rousing conclusion. Is the story plausible? Probably not, but in the world of fiction anything is possible and a good tale is worth the read. Deep in the swamps of Mississippi is a place where evil lives and men simply exist. Dark and brooding, At Thebes the laws of the jungle prevail while the men except their fate and simply live out their miserable lives. Into this horror stumbles Earl Swagger. Incarcerated, he barely endures and upon escape vows to return to put an end to Thebes State Penal Farm (colored). He does return and ends Thebes as only Earl Swagger can. Excellent story and plot highlighting man's epic struggle against evil. Many twists and turns but in the end good prevails. Good character development in the continuing Earl Swagger saga. Some graphic violence but germane to the story. No gratuitous violence, sex, or language. Mr. Hunter is a master storyteller with a knack of keeping the reader involved. Although simplistic, his good versus evil writing style is refreshing in today's overly complex "shades of gray" world. At 600 pages, Recommended for that long vacation where a little "good guys win" will be appreciated. I throughly enjoyed this book.

Shooters who have read their work will recognize the real gun writers that Stephen Hunter patterns some of his characters after in this tale. Most are dead now, and at least one escapes me. Elmer Keith, Bill Jordan, Jack O'Connor, Ed McGivern, well-known gun writers and experts all, and Audie Murphy, actor and decorated warrior, are easily recognized by their physical descriptions, as well as the false names assigned to them, and in many cases their real-life predilections and stomping grounds fit the bill. The character known as "Charlie" escapes me, but given his loud-mouthed bragging about how many men he has killed, I doubt that he is based on any real person at all. He does not fit anyone with whom I am familiar, and so I suspect that he is pure Hunter fiction. If not, he is lawsuit bait, and I hope I never meet his real-life counterpart. This is another fine action thriller by Hunter using a couple of his protagonists from other stories, Earl Swagger, an Arkansas Marine, fresh out of WWII, and Sam Vincent, a former State Prosecutor. This story, a little different from Hunter's usual fare, develops the old Yankee theme about the abysmal cruelties suffered by blacks in the deep South; in this case, Mississippi. Like most such tales, it is considerably overdrawn, and in fact a caricature of the real South, in which, in fact, I, an Oregonian, lived for a couple of years in the mid-'thirties. (By the way, Mr. Hunter, an accurate colloquial rendition of New Orleans in the local patois is more like Nyaw'luns, than the N'Awleens you seem to favor in this book, at least as I remember it from my youth). I am awed by Stephen Hunter's genius when it comes to spinning a tale. Usually he does not let political correctness intrude and spoil the story. In this case he comes close, but the story survives. He knows more about firearms than the average fiction writer. Whether his knowledge is simply derived from reading gun magazines, or whether from some actual experience with firearms, it is difficult to tell. As for his knowledge of prisons and prison routine, I can tell you he has a lot to learn, speaking from twenty years experience on the subject. What he describes here is a caricature about as accurate as a political cartoon compared to reality, even in the deep South of the 'thirties, where I saw my first chain gang working on a highway shoulder with balls and chains on their ankles under the shotgun of a cracker guard. But, this is a common fault of screenwriters as well. Most prison movies (Cool Hand Luke, The Longest Yard, The Shawshank Redemption, Escape From Alcatraz, etc., etc.), where the American public gets most of its information about prisons, unfortunately, tend to show the inmates as poor, misunderstood, or even innocent victims of the brutal "guards." It is disheartening to the men who work the toughest beat in law-enforcement to see themselves portrayed thus year after year, by Hollywood's mythmakers. But, in this story at least.

Pale Horse Coming, one of Hunter's best, is definitely not for the faint of heart. It is replete with a plethora of stomach turning violence.The story centers around the exploits of tempered steel tough Arkansas state trooper and Medal of Honor winner Earl Swagger and his father figure and Polk county prosecutor Sam Vincent. Vincent, a practicing attorney, gets a lucrative referral which takes him to the isolated backwoods Thebes State Penal Farm for Colored (the year is 1951) in Mississippi. Fearing for his safety he confides in Swagger who agrees to rescue him if he doesn't come home safely in a specfied amount of time. Thebes is run by a gang of racist, sadistic[s] ... who inflict relentless torture to the inmates. Vincent manages to become ensnared in the web of the prison farm and gets rescued by Swagger who himself gets captured. Swagger gets subjected to months of brutality and torture at the hands of the prisonguards headed by the notorious albino head sergeant known as Bigboy. With help from one of the aged trustees of the prison, Swagger manages to escape.Swagger, determined to bring the whole system down recruits a group of aging gunfighters to mount an attack on the penal farm. What results is a story that is hard to put down. Hunter creates other storylines which result in some interesting twists as the story concludes.

Pale Horse Coming is classic Stephen Hunter -- an epic battle of good versus evil, the limits of human endurance, courage under fire, loyalty, and of course, guns. The story centers around two characters from Hunter's previous works -- Sam Vincent, gentleman lawyer, and Earl Swagger, WWII veteran and medal of honor winner. On behalf of a client, Vincent journeys deep into the wilderness of Mississippi to check on the status of a prisoner at Thebes State Prison - the location where the worst of the worst "colored" offenders are sent. Suspecting that he is walking into a dangerous situation, Vincent obtains the word of Swagger that he will come looking for Vincent if he does not return from Mississippi in a pre-specified duration. Of course, Vincent walks into something that is beyond even his worst nightmares, thus engaging Swagger in his pledge to follow Vincent. The story moves well, has lots of action, suspense, and frequent plot twists, while giving the author a forceful understanding of race relations in the deep South during the 1950's. If you have liked Hunter's previous works, you will enjoy this as well. It is a compelling page turner.

If you've read Hunter before you'll recognize his archetypes: sergeants, bold, strong and taciturn, yakky old southern or western gunfighters, pretty young women, dastardly villains who deserve the whacking they get and how. And that's Hunter: cliches executed with such bravado they transcend their own triteness. In this one, our hero Earl Swagger is on a mission from God: he's encountered a place on earth that should be in hell, a viciously racist southern prison farm for black men, where oppression is the style of the day. And so Earl, surviving but just barely, goes to town: he recruites a magnificent seven or a seven samurai and goes to war. Hunter is both playful and sadistic in this one. His vision of the prison, with its ordeals of torture and oppression, its sense of crushing doom, is quite convincing. At the same time, he's having fun evoking movies (from Kurosawa, Sturges and Peckinpah) and literary sources (from Aeschylus to Faulkner, with Conrad and Freddie Forsythe thrown in for good measure), and part of the fun is catching his allusions.But the end result is extremely poweful narrative magic: you cannot put this sucker down until the end, and if you look, you'll see that it's 5 a.m., you have an 8 a.m. appointment, and you won't care.