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I was first introduced to Stephen Hunter through a comic book; I wish I could remember
which one. It was either "The Preacher" or "Justice League of
America," written, respectively, by Garth Ennis and Grant Morrison. Either Ennis or
Morrison was extolling Hunter's virtues in a letter column, and what was said sounded
interesting that I picked up DIRTY WHITE BOYS. I can't even drive by a Denny's without
thinking of a particular passage in that book; I can recite it from memory even though I
have read it but once. And if I happen to eat in one of those types of restaurants I
never, I mean never, sit with my back to the door. That, to my mind, is classic
writing.
You won't find Hunter in the "Classics" section of your local library or
Internet website. Hunter's subject matter is politically incorrect and none too genteel.
His protagonists, the men of the Swagger line, are flawed but good and honorable men who
fret over appropriateness of the use of hollow tip bullets in combat situations
(inappropriate for war, but well-suited for justice) and for whom word is equivalent to
bond. But what Hunter has been quietly doing, without fanfare and without the attention
that he richly deserves, is creating nothing less than a new American archetype in prose
writ large, with a sense of boldness and majesty all its own.
PALE HORSE COMING picks up where last year's HOT SPRINGS left of, with Earl Swagger
returned to duty with the Arkansas Highway Patrol. Sam Vincent, Swagger's friend and
mentor and former prosecuting attorney of Polk County Arkansas, is approached with a
proposition by a Chicago lawyer. Vincent is asked to investigate a prison for violent
black convicts, rumored to exist in all but unreachable Thebes, Mississippi. Vincent, low
on clients and cash, accepts the assignment, but not before telling Swagger where he is
going. When Vincent fails to return, Swagger, bound in equal parts by promise and
friendship, goes in search of him and finds a horror beyond anything he might have
imagined. The entire town is guarded by a gang of thugs who use fear and violence as the
means to control their charges. Swagger finds Vincent and frees him but loses his own
liberty in the process. Swagger vows to return to set things right and to destroy the
horror that he has witnessed. But he can't do it alone.
PALE HORSE COMING is one of those rarities, a novel of almost 500 pages that is too short
by half. Hunter is the consummate stylist --- his description, near the beginning of the
tale, of how Vincent became a "former" prosecuting attorney takes but a
paragraph and yet is as wholly unforgettable as anything I've read this year --- yet his
story never, ever gets lost within his words. His ear for dialogue matches that possessed
by Faulkner; he is able to remain true to the time of which he writes but he never sounds
artificial or stilted. And the violence, while gritty and uncompromising, is never
gratuitous.
If you've never read one of Stephen Hunter's works, try PALE HORSE COMING for 50 pages.
You'll read on, swept up by the grandeur of his storytelling, no matter how you might find
portions of the subject matter. If you are offended by violence, you might want to stop
reading within the last 100 pages or so of the book; my guess, however, is that you will
be compelled to keep going, however gruesome you might find Hunter's descriptions. We are
born in blood, and so, for some of us, that is how we go. Hunter does not linger on this,
but neither does he look away. And, in the end, neither will you.
--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
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