Read Michelle's new short story,
"The Hundred Day Men" in Forge's new
anthology of Western writing,
WESTWARD: A fictional history of the American West.
 ISBN 0765304511 |
Solid writing and richly varied subject matter make something special out of this anthology of 28 original stories, produced for the 50th anniversary of the Western Writers of America. Noting recent momentum toward "more authentic backdrops and more realistic plots and character" in traditional western tales, editor Walker (author of such expert popular histories as Bear Flag Rising, 1999, and Eldorado, 2002) has elicited from his contributors impressive reworkings of familiar material. The Lewis and Clark expeditions, for example, are the subject of Walker's own "York's Story" (about the expedition's lone black member: " . . . one who journeyed to the Western Sea and saw things no man of my color before me saw." The Civil War adventures of Confederate troops are depicted in Michelle Black's accusatory "The Hundred Day Men" and James Reasoner's blistering "Dead Man's Hollow"; the siege of the Alamo in John V. Breen's "A Man Alone"; Custer's Last Stand and after (as reported by the General's widow) in Susan K. Salzer's "Miss Libbie Tells All." Legendary figures make memorably vivid appearances: Oglala chieftain Crazy Horse (Janet E. Graebner's "The Whispering"); doomed gunslinger "Doc" Holliday (Arthur Winfield Knight's superb "The Big Die-Up"); and "mountain man" Jedediah Smith (Win Blevins's "Melodies the Song Dogs Sing") and Rocky Mountain trapper Jim Bridger (Richard C. House's splendid tall tale "Gabe and the Doctor").... [M]ost are simply, starkly written and several have the heft and tang of classics-to-be: Don Coldsmith's wistful vignette ("First Horse"), about a young Indian "Dreamer's" first sighting of an "elk-dog" (i.e., a horse) that prophesies his culture's altering future; Ivon B. Blum's fictionalization of a notorious wagon-train massacre spearheaded by Mormon settlers ("Inquest in Zion"); and Richard S. Wheeler's dazzling reimagining of the life of pseudonymous frontier journalist "Dan DeQuille" ("The Square Reporter"). A marvelous collection that can only help make reading westerns respectable once again.
Never Come Down
A Novel of the Colorado High Country.
"THERE ARE NO RULES ABOVE TEN THOUSAND FEET!"
This cryptic slogan puzzles Darcy Close when she arrives in Colorado's Tenmile Canyon. She has come to the high country to investigate the strange legacy left to her by her great aunt: A remote mountain ghost town called Leap Year and a terrible family secret.
"Living up here...something happens to you," local carpenter Evan Allender tells Darcy. "It's like a drug you can't get enough of. A high so incredible you never want to come down."
Darcy finds herself falling in love with both Leap Year and Evan, but will the price of life at altitude utimately prove to high? It might have for one of Darcy's ancestor's, Conor McAllister, who came to the Tenmile Canyon one hundred years earlier when Leap Year was a thriving boom town.
In tandem stories, Darcy and Conor experience the world above ten thousand feet in all its offbeat glory, but to save Leap Year from descruction, Darcy must solve the mystery of Conor's disappearance without repeating his fate.
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"This first novel is filled with romance, lost treasures, family secrets, happy endings, and the wonder of life in the High Country" - Great Divide Magazine |
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Lightning in a Drought Year
A forbidden friendship turns to love amidst the social and economic turmoil that would lead to the Populist Uprising. As women seek political equality with men, an unlikely herione steps forward to make history.
When her father's death forces Laurel McBryde to leave her beloved childhood home in the Flint Hills to live with the Hartmoors, a prosperous banking family, she feels like a lonely outcast among the prim and proper Victorians of Chisholm, Kansas.
Soon a growing attraction to radical politics and to Carey Fairchild, a tenant farmer on Hartmoor land, change Laurel's life forever.
"Black's earnest second novel explores Victorian Kansas through the experiences of a young proto-feminist and political activist" - Publishers Weekly.
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Novels: The Second Glass of Absinthe, Solomon Spring, An Uncommon Enemy
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