Western stories this time, in action adventure pulp style.
Good listening for an escape from the everyday. Full Cast audio drama. ( )

Received via Early Reviewers Program.

Of the three Hubbard pulp stories I have listened to so far on audiobook, Gunman's Tally is the best of the lot in my opinion. That may be due to setting as I prefer Westerns over World War II stories.

I'm still not entirely "sold" on the pulp genre as a whole (or L. Ron Hubbard specifically), but the story wasn't half bad and a good example of the genre and the time period it was written in. ( )

As perhaps previously noted in a past review, I have a profound love for pulp fiction, in particular when they delve into the Western category. I love listening to the old Gunsmoke radio shows. Consequently, I was really looking forward to Gunman's Tally.

The production value of the audiobooks are awesome. The sound effects and the acting are awesome. It definitely makes it more captivating that your normal audiobook. However, perhaps it's just that I have been experiencing a higher than normal level of fatigue lately, but every afternoon when I'd try to listen to more of the cowboys and their follies, I would find my eyelids growing heavy. I fear that perhaps I did not quite get the most out of the stories as I might have done if I had read them.

I say that as a type of disclaimer, because otherwise I did enjoy it. I enjoyed the title story, Gunman's Tally', more than the bonus story, 'Ruin at Rio Piedras'. Gunman's Tally was almost poetic, particularly in the beginning with its use of repetition and imagery. Ruin at Piedras I had a hard time understanding what was actually going on.

There was an appropriate amount of gun slinging and rogues. It definitely fits squarely amongst my Gunsmoke idea of what a Western should be like.

Because, there's only one way to handle the killers and the spoilers, and that's with a U.S. Marshal and the smell of Gunsmoke! ( )

I love westerns and this is a great short story. I really enjoyed listening to it. ( )

I should preface this by saying that I’m not really a fan of audiobooks in general-- I personally find them more effective for non-fiction works than for fiction, where I feel the portrayals limit my imagination and thus my enjoyment of the book. That being said, I could see the effort put into releasing this audiobook, but I didn’t find it particularly well done or enjoyable to listen to.

Actually, my favorite part of this audiobook was probably the packaging. It contained several essays on the author and his pulp fiction works in particular. They're biased but nonetheless provide an interesting context. Perhaps the most fascinating tidbit from the biographical essay discusses L. Ron Hubbard’s short-lived Argosy column and reality tv prodromus “Hell Job,” which described his experiences in a series of “dangerous professions.” A quick Google search reveals that some of his assignments included “Mine Inspector” and “Flying Trapeze,” and also, weirdly, “Ethnologist.” I imagine that these engagements shaped Hubbard’s preference for the pulp genre, in which he was extremely prolific.

I think that anyone who is a fan of pulp westerns will find this to be a standard offering. The story, admittedly a light one that doesn't really go anywhere quickly, involves cattle ranching and gunfire, and the writing revels in the hardscrabble portrait of the American West that is so appealing to adventure seekers. However, some issues become magnified when the novel is converted to an audiobook format. Descriptions that probably seem standard on the page start to take on a disconcerting tone. I would venture to guess that when Hubbard wrote this story, he did not expect it to get such a treatment. In fact, this revival project raises the question of whether he expected any of these works, which were admittedly printed on cheap, easily decaying paper (hence the name “pulp fiction”) to be preserved for posterity.

The prose here may be a matter of taste (I personally find it jarring to read that a man’s brain has “congealed around one thought.”) I also found some of the descriptive writing distracting-- at one point Hubbard writes that a man is an absurdly specific “6 feet 4 and only 130 pounds.” At other points the dialogue seems forced. But these are minor quibbles, and probably apply to the pulp genre as a whole-- the overall problem being that the text is dated in some obvious ways (it’s pretty distracting to hear a story told about a cowboy type named “Bill Gates,” for one.) You have to wonder whether the group of people working on this adaptation in 2012 were aware of that awkwardness, and whether that contributed to how often they veer into caricature.

My personal feeling is that inflection can’t replace tone when it comes to convincing voice acting, particularly when the characters portrayed are meant to represent excesses of human experience. “Doc Spriggs”, for instance, boasts accented, slightly gravelly speech, but still sounds like a clean, city-living person, as do most of the actors used here. In a story that depends so much on the extremity of its characters, one would hope for a more committed performance. Most problematic is the fact that the portrayals here are sometimes racist in nature, something that is not rectified by the voice acting: Hubbard refers to a Chinese person as “The Chinese,” “The Little Yellow Man,” etc., while the actor speaks in a stereotypical accent. I think it’s great that the production attempted to adhere to the tone of the source material, but this is one case where they rose to the occasion a little too well. ( )