Western Wednesday

It’s another Western Wednesday so saddle up and ride with me a spell.

It’s probably no secret that in most fiction, Western or any other genre, the villain of the piece is often as fascinating—or at least should be—as the hero. Sometimes folks can even empathize with the bad guy, and other times they just love to hate the hell of him. Or her. In my westerns I spend a lot of time trying to get into the head of the bad guy, and it’s not always a pleasant experience. In fact, it usually leaves me drained, feeling a bit dirty. There are some mindsets in this world that rational people (not that I have ever been accused of such!) have trouble understanding, let alone wallowing in for as long as it takes to write a novel. Since I step into the villain’s boots as well as the hero’s in my books, it can be a troubling experience to seek insight into their motivations and acts. There are just some folks you don’t want to understand, some things in the darkness you don’t want to shine a light on and look at full in the face.

The villain of my Lance Howard novel The Devil’s Rider, Jeremy Trask, is one such fella. He’s a mass murderer, violent and mean as a rattlesnake, and his deeds in the book are on a fairly high level of violence for a western. He is a troubled individual as well, a man constantly seeking revenge on the father who made him what he is, though he has succeeded by leaps and bounds in surpassing his patriarch’s corrupt personality. And the men, and woman, who ride with him aren’t much for church-going, either.

The Devil’s Rider pushes the Western’s boundaries in a number of areas as well. It takes a hard look at homelessness in the form of a young woman named Spring Treller, the intricacies of revenge and how far a man will go to get it as the hero seeks Trask out for killing his brother, and the taboos of a Lesbian killer. The book is due out in paperback October 1st and you can preorder copies from the publisher at http://www.ulverscroft.com/title.php?sqlCmd=isbn%3D9781847828507 (Copies of the hard cover may still be available from http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/ and http://www.amazon.co.uk/ )

I’ll end with an opening excerpt from the book, spotlighting Trask and his cluttered mind.

The Devil’s Rider

The sun sinking into the distant mountains made the town of Baton Ridge appear awash in blood. Scarlet stained the encroaching shadows and sparkled from water in troughs like glittering blood rubies.

To Jeremy Trask, perched atop his horse, even the air smelled of the gunmetal scent of fresh-spilled blood. He could almost feel its silky wetness running through his fingers.

A prophesy, he reckoned, one that would be fulfilled in only a few fleeting moments. A fragmented laugh whispered through his thin lips. His scrubbed-gray eyes narrowed under a battered Stetson whose rim showed a hole where a bullet had punched through not two days ago.

He shifted in his saddle, nerves biting like fire ants under his skin, and glanced at the three others sitting atop their horses to his right. He’d reined them to a halt on the hill above the town, two men and one woman dressed in dusters and low-pulled hats. Each face held a look of vicious anticipation. These riders of his, they were as bloody a bunch as he had ever known, though anybody who knew him would have said they were greenhorns compared to their leader.

No, pa, don’t hit me anymore…please…I won’t do it again, I swear I won’t, I swear--

Pain stabbed his skull as a black memory echoed from the past. His gaze snapped back to the town, a surge of—what? Fear? Yes, it felt like fear that swelled in his belly. But not present fear. No, something worse, the kind that crawled from the depths of a fella’s mind, made him relive the times a boy had cowered beneath a father’s pounding fists; made him recollect the awkward and indifferent faces of folks in a town who had turned their back on a child, folks who had given up one of their own to a bounty hunter sent to bring in a bank robber.

Another whispered laugh escaped his lips. Had they only realized the true extent of Jeremy Trask’s evil, known of the men he had murdered just because watching a fella bleed his last gave him pleasure, or of the women he had raped because nothing felt better than that moment of utter dominance over a weaker helpless creature; had they but known, they would have strung him up before that bounty man arrived and spared themselves the horror that would soon take place.

But they had not. And now their mistake sat on a hillside, a Smith & Wesson at his waist, a Winchester in his saddleboot and a powerful rage surging through his veins. The time of reckoning was at hand. He was Fate’s dark angel of vengeance.