I can hear it now (because some have already asked)—a revised edition of a 3 year-old book? Why bother? Surely you could find something better to do with your time, like clean the fish tank or organize your sock drawer.
Traditional wisdom tells authors to never look back, to release their novels into the wild and move on to the next one. Traditional wisdom says tinkering with a previously-published manuscript wastes time better served working on a new project. And traditional wisdom is right … except when it’s not.
Simply put, this was an itch I had to scratch, an itch that kept me from giving new projects my full attention. Until I went back and revisited/revised The Assassin’s Prayer, I wouldn’t be able to really buckle down on a new book. (Or books, actually—Warlock #1: Autofire Blitz and Chunks of Hell: A Horror Anthology. But we’ll talk about those at another time.)
Call me a perfectionist (not that my novel, or anyone’s novel for that matter, is perfect) or accuse me of OCD—I won’t deny either charge—but the fact that I knew I could improve The Assassin’s Prayer gnawed at me. Sure, the book sold like weed at Woodstock when it was first released, but reader feedback and reviews made it clear there were some issues that could easily be remedied with some tidying up of the narrative. It wouldn’t take much effort to make the book better, so why not do so?
Make no mistake, we’re not talking a major overhaul here. For example, a decent chunk of readers dislike, despise, or downright loathe the ending of the novel, but I refuse to change that, even though doing so would probably make the book more commercially viable. (That either makes me a stubborn fool or a damn fool …you decide.)
No, pretty much all I did was trim some of the melancholy fat from my main character’s—Travis Kain—angst. You see, when I set out to write The Assassin’s Prayer, I was determined to give Kain greater emotional depth than the typical action hero (or in this case, antihero), so he’s a bit of a grumpy bastard with more than his fair share of baggage. As some reviewers noted, (in the original version) Kain spent too much time crying in his whiskey.
In this revised edition, those kind of “emo assassin” (to borrow a phrase from my buddy Jack Badelaire) scenes have been scaled back. What used to be a paragraph of internal torment is now just a sentence or two. The story moves faster and Kain—while hardly a sunshine and roses kind of guy—is less sullen and morose. Heck, I think I even let him crack a joke or two this time.
Listen, despite a streamlined narrative and a spiffy new cover, I don’t expect sales to skyrocket, but that’s not why I revamped the book. I revamped it for me, to exorcise that whiny, nagging voice in the back of my brain that kept whispering, “You can make it better.” Because sometimes the only way to make your demons shut the hell up is to do what they tell you.
Truth be told, I’m actually not a big fan of westerns, save for those written back in the ‘70s and ‘80s by the so-called Piccadilly Cowboys, a pint-drinking pack of British authors who took the American western formula and turned it on its head by casting antiheroes as the protagonists instead of white-hat good guys and reveling in the kind of graphic violence usually reserved for splatter-punk horror. Alas, those kind of ultra-violent westerns have seemingly gone out of style, much like dueling with pistols and disco, so I rarely pay attention to new western series when they debut, generally finding them too stale and sterilized for my liking.
But when Piccadilly Publishing announced they were releasing a brand new hard-hitting action-western series, my literary taste buds started salivating like a starving wolf eyeballing a crippled lamb. The fact that it was being put out by Piccadilly Publishing (named after those aforementioned Piccadilly Cowboys), the cool cover art, the fact that they were advertising it as a violent series … all these factors combined to jack my hopes higher than the tallest cactus in Texas that at long last a new western would capture the flavor of those old Piccadilly Cowboy books.
I hoped Drifter would be in the same vein as Edge, Breed, Steele, Claw, Jubal Cade, etc. and I must confess to a smidgen of disappointment when I started reading and realized that Drifter lacks the explicit violence of those old series. It's not tame by any stretch of the imagination—folks are killed and blood is spilled, and the killin’ and spillin’ happen fairly frequently—but it does not go for the gore with gusto. So, for better or worse (depending on your personal proclivities), it’s not a Piccadilly Cowboy styled western. That said, you most definitely will not mistake Drifter for a Louis L'Amour or Zane Grey western either. It’s much more violent than that, thank the god of six-guns, even if that violence isn’t spelled out in gruesome detail.
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| Paperback cover |
The best thing about Drifter is that the story moves with the speed of a rattlesnake strike, the plot stripped down to the bare-bone essentials like a vulture-picked carcass. No lofty themes. Nary a whiff of pretentiousness. No interest in naval gazing. A man tangles with a pack of mangy cutthroats. Pack of mangy cutthroats rape and slaughter man's wife. Man vows revenge, hunts down the pack of mangy cutthroats, and blows them all to Hell. End of story. (Hopefully I didn’t need to post a spoiler alert…)
As you can tell, it’s a classic tale that’s been told a thousand times before, but that doesn’t dull its entertainment value. Much like fine whiskey and voluptuous women, there is just something comforting about reading a traditional story-line told with surefooted skill and that’s what author Brent Towns (writing as Jake Henry) brings to the table. His style is deceptively simple, eschewing fancy words and purple prose in favor of lean, mean writing. He never uses twelve words when ten will do just fine, trimming all the fat and letting nothing stand in the way of all the gun-blazing action.
Bottom line, Drifter #1: "Savage" is packed with hot bullets and cold vengeance, so action-western fans should gobble it up. If you glance at your bookshelf and see titles like Slocum, Longarm, and Gunsmith sitting there in all their dog-eared, paper-backed glory, then you should definitely give Drifter a shot.
