The Violent Land

The Violent Land by William W. Johnstone, published by Pinnacle Books in 2012, is a Western in the grand tradition of hard country, hard men, bad tempers and the general understanding that disagreements are unlikely to be resolved through mediation.

Johnstone was enormously prolific, and his name became almost synonymous with modern American Western fiction: frontier towns, gunfighters, outlaws, ranchers, feuds, survival and landscapes large enough to ensure that help is always several days away when something unpleasant happens.

The title The Violent Land is therefore refreshingly honest.

Nobody is pretending this is The Mildly Inconvenient Land.

You can reasonably expect trouble.

The novel belongs to the sort of Western storytelling where the land itself is part of the problem. Distance matters. Weather matters. Horses matter. Reputation matters. And being in the wrong place at the wrong time can rapidly become a full-time occupation.

Johnstone’s appeal lies partly in pace.

His books are not generally designed for readers hoping to spend forty pages examining the symbolic meaning of a curtain.

People arrive.

People argue.

People ride somewhere.

Somebody makes a bad decision.

Gunfire follows.

This is fiction built for momentum.

The frontier setting also allows the usual moral landscape of the Western to operate at full strength. Law may exist, but not necessarily nearby. Justice may arrive, but not always through official channels. And the difference between an honest man and a dangerous one can sometimes be disappointingly small.

For fans of traditional Westerns, that is exactly the point.

The genre has always been less about historical reconstruction than about pressure: isolated communities, uncertain authority, violence never far away and characters forced to make decisions before anybody has time to convene a committee.

Published in 2012, The Violent Land is a modern novel wearing the clothes of the old frontier, continuing a style of storytelling that has survived films, television, changing literary fashions and repeated announcements that the Western is finished.

The Western, much like the cowboy inside it, has generally responded by refusing to die.

This copy is ex-library, which gives it a small amount of additional life history before it even reaches the reader.

Expect the usual evidence of former institutional ownership: stamps, labels, stickers, markings or whatever administrative paraphernalia was required to ensure the book eventually found its way back to the correct shelf.

Possibly.

Ex-library books are sometimes treated with suspicion by collectors, but there is something rather appropriate about a Western paperback having already travelled around, been handled repeatedly and survived a few encounters with the public.

It has experience.

Condition: Fair. This is an ex-library copy and shows the usual signs of previous library use and general handling. It is a reading copy rather than a pristine collector’s example, but remains perfectly suitable for anyone more interested in the story than in whether the barcode sticker had an adventurous youth.

ISBN: 9780786028115.

A fast-moving Western for readers who like frontier justice, dangerous country, gunfighters and stories in which the nearest official authority is usually too far away to be much practical use.

Sold by Crappy Old Books — where even the ex-library copies have survived more trouble than some of the characters.

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