Never Die

From Library JournalWe are in the corrupt Western town of Nitburg at the turn of the century. The town and its people are in the last, desperate throws of a dying past and a murderous future. What "never dies" in Hannah's extravagant satire is a feeling for our ability to inflict endless, grotesque, and mindless havoc on ourselves, others, and the environs. The story concerns an evil judge who rules the town with an iron hand and a hero who is more pretty than brave. They collide amid the squalor of whores, dopers, a tubercular lover, a malevolent dwarf, and the coming of the automobile. The result is a ritualized bloodletting of farcical proportion: just about everybody dies or is maimed. While one is left breathless and awash in the cleansing fires that engulf the town, Hannah lingers with his dark theme that such renewal is illusional, and all that is lasting is our blind stubbornness to persist in all our questionable glory. A wonderful work; highly recommended.- Joseph Levandoski, Free Lib. of PhiladelphiaCopyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.Product DescriptionIn 1910, in a frontier town rife with corruption, a colorful group of characters--a dwarf and a judge who own the town and the judge's daughter, Nandina, who loves Fernando, a gunfighter who vows to destroy the town--take part in a dark comedy of lust and revengeFrom Publishers WeeklyHannah ( Ray ; Airships ) targets the western genre with this outrageous, savage yet stillborn farce set in 1910, in a town named Nitburg. Idle gunslinger Fernando Mure resolves to burn the town to the ground, partly because it's corrupt, partly because the Chinese have moved in. After Judge Kyle Nitburg, who sold his first wife into slavery to Indians, hires a dwarf to smash Mure's kneecaps with a baseball bat, Fernando plots revenge with the help of his tubercular, dying girlfriend, Stella. An apocalyptic shoot-out is a fitting climax to this raunchy tale, clever without being funny, that lays bare a Wild West full of violence, cruelty, racism, morphine, booze, clap and coolies. Hannah populates his frenetic mythical frontier with grotesques, including twin sheriffs, a horny reverend who flies a biplane, a hermit, a homosexual opium-loving doctor given to "visions of manly gunfire," a blind millionaire widow and assorted ornery killers.Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Author: Hannah, Barry

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Binding: Hardcover

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0395515602

ISBN-13: 9780395515600