“And now he was perfectly conscious that Winter’s words were inspiring in him the feeling that he, Noah, had always inspired in others: That what he had believed to be the iron laws of the universe were merely his own prejudices, a tottering shanty built of questions, a stack of assumptions all the way down. That the marketplace was a deep, dark pool of chaos, and that this man was its true apostle.
But then he shook himself, blinked, and remembered that Winter was just a murderous lunatic, brought here by his brother.”

I was expecting this to be more Wild West-y, but while the book begins in Oklahoma, its five vignettes about the Winter family take place all over the country. I hadn’t planned on Georgia after the Civil War or 1870s Chicago right before an election - the Republicans are the good guys?! - but although I struggled a bit at the beginning, Jackman can take disparate settings & make them hang together beautifully. Winter’s story is told in a series of specific events bracketed by summaries of the atrocities that he and his family commit as they range around. This device is effective inasmuch as even though at some point I realized that I hadn't seen Winter do anything more than kill one of the soldiers who tortured him in Georgia, with every page I turned I expected him to casually murder whatever character he was dealing with. Winter gets a new suit - why not kill the tailor? Winter returns to his childhood home & runs into the old couple who’d occasionally taken care of him in between beatings from his preacher father - why not kill those two? He's so effectively written as both filled with nothingness & almost mythically untouchable by the law that everyone he comes in contact with seems automatically marked by death by virtue of breathing the same air as he. Although there are abominations galore committed by every member of the family, Augustus is often on the periphery during the action, watching his henchmen darting into battle, singing ridiculous hymns and taking crack shots at the law-abiding, but for all that you rarely see him do anything worse than any of the other guys, it’s still easy to get caught up in the terror he inspires. Everyone who says, “He’s just a man,” learns their lesson soon enough.

Mildly amusing – Bill read this while I was reading The Library at Mount Char and then we switched books. I told him I was having a hard time getting into this because it was so violent & he did a double take & said, “For god’s sake, at least Auggie never roasted anyone alive in a giant barbecue grill.” Which, yeah, I suppose he’s right and TLAMC is pretty freaking violent, but it’s fantastic violence & this is much grittier & it gets to me a bit. I can read about David & the golden bull and wince, but stuff like this: “The Winter family emerged from the cornfield behind a farmhouse near the edge of town. A woman drawing water saw them. She let the bucket she was holding tumble into the well and she ran, shrieking, into the house . . . The Empire brothers and a few of the rowdier ones followed Winter inside. Charlie Empire was already unbuckling his pants as he hopped through the back door” is much more gruesome if you ask me. Anyhow, if you're into gross, gritchy westerns that don't offer a lot of redemption or closure (although the death of one particular character about 2/3rds of the way through, though it could have been a lot more drawn out in my opinion, was worth my price of admission) but are entertaining in spite of all that, you could do a lot worse than this book.