Western tale eww, but fun

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/10/2006 (7143 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

By Tom Franklin

William Morrow, 272 pages, $31

Reviewed by Susie Moloney

IF the style and tone of American writer Tom Franklin’s wild western Smonk seems reminiscent of another western, say, HBO’s violent and unrepentant Deadwood, that’s because Franklin apparently spent a couple of productive days on the set of the show by way of researching the novel.

If that’s true, then the recon paid off. Smonk is violent, crude, raw and over-sexed, just like its cable kin. Also like the television show, it’s fairly irresistible.

That said, despite the presence of gunslingers, bar whores and grubby little boys, Smonk is no ordinary western. For one thing, it doesn’t take place in the West, but in the South, mostly the fictional town of Old Texas, in Alabama.

The story opens cryptically with a failed ambush of the notorious E.O. Smonk. For years, on Saturday nights, Smonk has been coming around to Old Texas, stealing the women and killing the menfolk.

After a particularly nasty incident, the few fearful men of the town are convinced they must bring Smonk to justice. A posse is dispatched and Smonk negotiates a surrender of sorts, which he then micro-manages into the slaughter of most of the town’s men and a whole lot of the town’s women. Nasty, nasty.

The balance of the book is a chase scene, both the chase of Smonk by the bailiff McKissick, and by a church-loving, Scripture-spouting Pinkerton wannabe, Phail Walton. Walton is chasing not Smonk, but the whore-child Evangeline, for reasons of his own. Of course, the two stories intersect in the last few pages.

Franklin, Mississippi-based, has released two previous books: A collection of stories called Poachers, and a novel, Hell at the Breech, based on a real-life feud between poor share croppers and land owners in the late 1800s, were well received.

His story this time is at turns inventive, exciting, disgusting, dully repetitive and curious. It’s also funny when the opportunity comes up, and it does, in surprising ways.

There’s not a redeemable character to be found. Smonk is wholly populated with disreputable, despicable, vulgar characters, liars and cheats, the ugly and disfigured, not to mention the downright evil.

E.O. Smonk himself is a dwarfish, syphilitic, goitered, tubercular red head compared more than once in the book to an orangutan, and not in a nice way. None of this matters to the reader in the throes of the gun battle, the explosion, the vile and crude sex act. None of it really matters until the end of the book when nearly everyone is dead, and you need someone or something to root for.

There’s not much to choose from. Walton, the one “near-good” character is so sexually repressed, uncool, self-righteous and straight, his final act of redemption is like a mint found in a sock drawer. Sure it’s candy, but who wants it? Which is not to say it isn’t fun.

The reviled Smonk is somehow a magnet for female lust, thinly explained in crude terms, relating to big feet and large shoes. The carnality is almost bestial, which turns out to be somewhat accurate, and includes the whole range of nasty: incest, child sex, violent sex, go ahead and name it.

If this were a movie, it would be rated “U” for eww. (Again, not to say it isn’t fun.)

Susie Moloney is a gunslinging gal,

currently writing in Manitoba.