| The Nevada Mustang is a famous spotted
Appaloosa stallion, sought after by every man who has horse fever. Joe Blade and his cousin Chavez have the fever, and Chavez in particular is determined to put his rope around the stallion's neck, or die trying. When Blade and Chavez's horses are shot
out from under them as Chavez is roping the stallion, Chavez fails to jump clear in time and his lungs are punctured by his ribs. He lingers at death's door, not willing to leave without possessing the Appaloosa. But he has stiff competition from the
gunman Marty Carr and his gang, and from Little Wolf, the horse-crazy Kiowa. Joe Blade is determined to get even with whoever put Chavez on the road to death, and to get the Nevada Mustang while he's at it. This is a sterling example of a traditional
Western. Dialogue is sparse, landscape passages poignant and pointed, and the cumulative tension of Blade's unrelenting quest for revenge and the Appaloosa makes THE NEVADA MUSTANG the best kind of page-turner. But the real star of this novel is
the landscape. Ernest Hemingway famously advised John Dos Passos to "Get the goddamned weather into your books", and Matt Chisholm gives an object lesson in how to do this. The Nevada desert and its rare waterholes are wonderfully evoked in
stark, precise writing. The devastating heat is palpable, the lack of water exhausting; the weather and landscape soon become the meanest villain of the piece, merciless and inescapable. Men and horses alike suffer, and the course of this suffering is
superbly
set down by Chisholm. THE NEVADA MUSTANG is the kind of exciting traditional Western this reviewer will never tire of reading. Thoroughly recommended. |
