"It is true that the arm of the law is long, but it is slow. I think you'd know by now, better than anyone here, the shortcomings of the law in the lawless states."
Buffalo Shells is my ongoing western saga. It centers around early-retired gunslinger Caine Shelley, who left the profession quietly on account of early onset arthritis in his hands. He's been gone from the scope of bounty-killing for some span of time, but returns to it readily enough when Laws Sullivan begrudgingly hires him out to kill his torturer.
A sprawling, snowbound western grounded in a cutthroat pseudo-American frontier, Buffalo Shells is a story of injustice, violent penance, and the place of gunmen in the industrialized west.
excerpt:
He was, once, the snow. He was inclement, endless—an untethered thing that no man killed. Unhurried and untouched. Untouched but having touched in the skin of others the same as snow that spread itself though layers: he remained long after the melt. It was the nature of all gunmen—those that remained in the close terrors of common men.
I like to explore facets of brutality, judgement, survival. I also like rugged men. I can have both in writing westerns. I started writing Buffalo Shells in early 2020. I have always liked spaghetti westerns and felt particularly inspired to write a snowbound western after first viewing of Sergio Corbucci's The Great Silence.
In writing Buffalo Shells, I was also heavily interested in the brutal depiction of bison slaughter and the comparison of such brutality to sadism on the part of the antagonist. Something which informed my writing of bison slaughter was the novel Butcher's Crossing by John Williams. The novel is an existentialist western which follows 4 men on a brutal hunt for bison at the height of the bison trade. It is a novel largely about waste and needless killing.
Buffalo Shells is a work in progress; the day it is published I'll not be able to shut up about it.