E. J. Hunter

Western grindhouse exploitation! Indsploitation? Westploitation!

I bought this after seeing the covers for this series and wondering, "Can this possibly be as trashy as it looks?" Absolutely.

Our heroine is a half-Amerind settler, whom the book constantly refers to as "half-breed." Seriously, an average sentence might be, "The half-breed checked her 1876 double-action Peacemaker to make sure it had at least five 128 grain bullets." Yes, it also describes the guns like an Executioner novel. After four years of captivity with the Ogala Sioux, our heroine has escaped to kill both of her uncles and their gang who sold her into slavery.

Dungeons & Dragons players should find this familiar; the White Squaw is written like someone's half-elf or half-orc in a fantasy novel. The Amerindians here sure could be orcs, for that matter. I wasn't able to find enough info to doublecheck their portrayal, but they might as well be Klingons in headdresses.

Using the skills she learned from her captors, our heroine will take on gunfight after gunfight, sex scene after sex scene, while us readers are constantly reminded of her "full breasts" and "shapely legs." One day, soon, I look forward to picking up a book where the protagonist's nipples are not described in detail.

That's the pacing of this novel down. Every chapter, you can generally expect either a gunfight or a sex scene, often with dubious if any consent involved. At the point in which our heroine encounters a penis whose "length reached nearly two handspans of a big man" with a base so wide she can't close her fingers around it, I'm pretty sure it's the audience being fucked with.

Also, most awkward vagina metaphors ever.

There's a terrible missed chance at good writing. The book has the outlaw gang all comment on the Irish's guys habit for using younger girls in terrible ways. This book wants you to understand that this bandit is a pedophile so really, Really, REALLY bad. It's more obvious than a billboard with his picture that says "I PUT MY PENIS IN UNDERAGED GIRLS.

It was legitimately creepy, and I thought it was a nice touch. Then, rather than leave it to our imagination, the book describes it in detail and has him do it just off-screen. Twice.

It's high up in the "Top Ten Least Pleasant Passages I've Ever Read." You know, E.J. Hunter, once you give us six pages of hinting about horrible things a psycho likes to do to people, you don't have to actually show it.

But as I said, this a grindhouse movie Western in book format. If this had been released as a film in the 70's, the recently-restored DVDs would be classics currently advertised in the pages of Rue Morgue Magazine.

In the end . . . it was okay. It moves along well enough for a men's adventure series, but the protagonist never becomes the central badass, sometimes being outdone by her burly white Indian captive comrade. In the end, she gets her revenge . . . on one of the dudes.

Hey, there's twenty-four books in the series. They have to pace themselves, y'know?… (mais)