Dan was laughing. At least that chuckling murmur was near to a laugh. Yet there was no mirth in it. It had that touch of the maniacal in it which freezes the blood. Silent halted in the midst of his rush, with his hands poised for the next blow. His mouth fell agape with an odd expression of horror as Dan stared up at him. That hideous chuckling continued. The sound defied definition. And from the shadow in which Dan was crouched, his brown eyes blazed, changed, and filled with yellow fires.
If the passage above, taken from Max Brand’s novel The Untamed, seems a little turgid to you, I am in agreement. The book was free for Kindle, and I’d never read any Brand, so I thought I’d give him a try. I don’t think I’m going to be a fan. The prose is labored, and dialogue (though the slang is probably authentic, since the author actually worked as a cowboy for a while) clunks like a counterfeit double eagle.
And yet… considering how literary tastes change, I could see how this could have been an extremely popular book in its time. There’s a mythic quality to it, especially toward the climax, where the image of a mysterious rider in the dark, whistling a weird melody as he approaches with death in his hands, evokes a scene that could have inspired Sergio Leone. Continue reading The Untamed, by Max Brand