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Stevie-Ray said:
Pale Horse Coming with the idiotic renaming of all the historical figures in gun lore.
Someone… no names, please… seems to be unfamiliar with the issue of intellectual property as it relates to individual identities.
Pale Horse Coming is a work of fiction, and while the six figures who join
Earl Swagger in their mission against the Thebes penal colony (hint: research "Seven against Thebes") are all based on historical figures immediately recognizable to anyone over the age of 30 in what John Ross terms "the gun culture," though most of them had already passed on at the time it was first published, a writer of fiction simply cannot play fast and loose with real personages in a fictional setting… Ross himself had to revise some names of real people in second and subsequent printings of
Unintended Consequences… even though those characters don't have anywhere near the sizeable roles in the narrative as Hunter's half-dozen do.
Also, Hunter so completely nails the miserable nature of the character of "
Charlie Hatchison" that had he used the man's real name, the estate of the "unrepentant sinner" probably could have gone to court and collected as much in damages as the royalties of any three of Hunter's books!
More than any of the
Bob Lee stories, I like the one's about
Earl. Hunter has a great feel for the times and places in which they are set, and
Pale Horse Coming is a very clever (and compelling) combining of the
roman à clef literary convention and the updating of a classic Greek myth.