It's
1849. A frontier cabin outside the recently founded Fredericksburg, Texas.
Teenaged Eli McCullough is kidnapped by the Comanche, his mother and siblings
slaughtered. Eli's gradually incorporated into the tribe, taught to shoot a bow
and hunt. Taught to go on raiding parties and kill. And then he's forced back into
white civilization, a 16-year-old going on 40: first a curiosity, then an
outcast, then a Texas Ranger. This is the book you want to read this
summer.
Philipp
Meyer's The Son (Ecco, $28) is the follow-up to his debut, American
Rust, which made his name one to remember.
Like
his first book, it pulses and bleeds and twitches. Every facet of Meyer's world
- scent and sight and sensation - has weight and heft. The details about small
arms and artillery. Details about flora and fauna. Details about the Comanche.
The Comancheros. Texans.
You feel the arrow wounds and smell the gun smoke. You taste the oil that the
characters pull from the ground, hear the horses nickering, see Old West vistas
as magnificent as those you'll find in a John Ford film. (There's a set piece
in the book in which a young Eli must prove himself to the Comanche by
participating in a raid against the Delaware that I'd put up against anything
you'll find by McMurtry or A. B. Guthrie Jr.) Here, history is not a thing to
look back on and judge through the lens of our moral superiority. History is a
tragedy-unavoidable, inevitable-that grows out of basic human frailty and the
desire to survive.
Meyer's
dream is a nightmare in which blood seeks power. It's also unput- down-able.
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