Order PIG IRON here
(also reviewed)
Order THE LAST PROJECTOR here
Order FISH BITES COP! here
Tom considers this a moment.
"That ain't no fable," he decides. "A fable has a point."
"So does your fucking head."
One thing that keeps mankind from curing cancer, achieving world peace and doing other self-explanatory stuff we should've done by now is the firm refusal to admit that every good thing has to end at some point. That television show you remember so fondly was great because it ended before the screenwriting team ran out of ideas. The movie from your childhood kept its freshness year after year because there were no sequels to fuck things up. Westerns are great, timeless pieces because we all know how it ends and going back to that era will feel redundant to audiences before the novel/movie even started.
What does the Western have left in the pants and how do you pull it out? That's a question I haven't been able to answer since I have started reviewing books six years ago, but if I had to commission an author to write the definitive contemporary Western, I would look no further than David James Keaton, who knows every genre trope enough to turn them on their head and give anxiety attacks to his readers and seldom wears trousers. Turns out Keaton published a contemporary Western called PIG IRON this summer that solves none of my existential quandaries with the genre, but kind of does, too.
Ugh. Keaton! What have you done to me?
PIG IRON is not a novel, but it kind of is, too. It is a series of loosely tied surrealistic vignettes that fit together thematically more than they do narratively. It's about the desolate town of Agua Fria, where there is no water anymore. The people that haven't died yet are making peace with God and cheating their unbearable thirst with whiskey. Agua Fria has fallen under the influence of a color coded brutal gang of scanvenging outlaws lead by a man named Red, but not only his greed has lead the in this godforsaken part of America. There is a nameless Ranger coming to town to sort out an old quarrel with Red. These things rarely ended up with a prison term, back then.
David James Keaton cannot write anything straight. It's both the best and the worst thing about him. He's like a weird uncle, trying to destabilize you at a family gathering. At first, you think he's drunk and you're making fun of him, but only to realize that YOU are the one that's drunk and he's making fun of you. In fact, everybody at the party is making fun of you. It can be an existential nightmare. In PIG IRON, not only he deconstructs the ol' vengeance-in-the-West trope, but also experiments with non-linear storytelling like he did in THE LAST PROJECTOR although here he had the courtesy of giving dates and places in order to keep his readers in the loop. I don't know what Keaton's latest evil experiment achieves per se, but it does show one thing: revenge is emotionally and logistically complex business.
I hear you asking a very pertinent question then: what is there to enjoy about PIG IRON apart from the deliberate post-structuralist nightmare? It's a good point because I don't know many people aside from me and maybe Gabino Iglesias, who actually enjoy this sort of stuff. The vignettes of PIG IRON are all enjoyable in themselves. David James Keaton has thing for denying his readers the satisfaction of figuring out his plot of his novels, so he keeps delaying important plot developments and writes humorous and often surreal stuff just for the sake of it. Granted that it takes patience to appreciate such playfulness, Keaton's twisted sense of humor is one of the calling cards of PIG IRON. It has no bearing whatsoever on the storyline, but some vignettes are just great moments in town righ.
So, what has David James Keaton done to the Western genre exactly? He has drained as much meaning as he could from two stereotypical figures without rendering them meaningless. PIG IRON is a good vs evil story set in a world where good vs evil doesn't mean anything. That sort of thing gets me going. It's as much of a Western as a car is a car after being chopped. It has all the pieces and the potential to be one, but it's just something else. A Keatonian sculpture. A guided tour of the old West where the guide is actually trying to kill you. I don't think it'll be a hit with the traditional Western crowd, but like THE LAST PROJECTOR, it'll get the breakneck readers going. David James Keaton is the mad scientist of genre fiction. He creates new things out of dead stuff.
