Define Out Of Books In the Rogue Blood

Title	:	In the Rogue Blood
Author	:	James Carlos Blake
Book Format	:	Kindle Edition
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 352 pages
Published	:	July 10th 2012 by Harper Perennial (first published 1997)
Categories	:	Westerns. Fiction. Historical. Historical Fiction

In the Rogue Blood Kindle Edition | Pages: 352 pages

Narrative Conducive To Books In the Rogue Blood

James Carlos Blake’s In the Rogue Blood is set in a dystopian, ultraviolent version of the American southwest. It begins in the 1840s, in Florida, and later moves to the borderlands of Mexico and Texas. There are untold murders, a gang of scalp hunters, and a writing-style that often harks back to the ornate grammatical structures of the 19th century.

If this sounds a bit like Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, well, you aren’t the first person to notice the similarities.

And that’s a bit unfortunate. The American southwest, especially the time period encompassing the oft-ignored Mexican-American War, is big enough to handle two novels. Moreover, aside from some obvious overlap – “blood” in the title, a dim view of mid-19th century frontier humanity, and the trafficking of human hair – the two books are as different as night and day.

Which is a long-winded way of saying I actually liked Blake’s novel, whereas I don’t care for McCarthy’s.

Now, before you string me up, scalp me, and sell my fast-thinning to hair to a very low-rent wigmaker, let me be clear that I don’t absolutely hate Blood Meridian. Indeed, I respect its place in American letters. It is, in its way, a classic. That said, it’s also incredibly dense – in both prose and ideas – and reeks of a self-importance marked by a lack of quotation marks, its grandiloquent paragraphs that mimic the Bible and Faulkner, and its self-conscious mythmaking.

(This is purely a subjective, personal thing. I loved No Country For Old Men, which is everything that Blood Meridian is not: lean, stripped down prose; stylized dialogue; and on-the-nose themes and meanings. What can I say? I’m a literalist).

At first blush, In the Rogue Blood shares a lot of Blood Meridian’s pretensions. Its first sentence – “In the summer of 1845 Edward Little was sixteen years old and restless in the blood” – aims squarely at the essential, mythologized American character, the westward-looking, frontier-pushing young man, described by D.H. Lawrence as “hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”

It also shares with McCarthy a beautiful eye for landscapes. One of the true pleasures of Blake is simply going where he takes you. It is a travelogue drenched in blood.

The pinewoods fell behind and the sky widened and the country opened up and assumed a gentle roll. He rode through bunch grass and along bottoms lined with hardwoods, passed through pecan groves and stands of oak. In time he came upon the first rocky outcroppings and cedar brakes at the edge of the hill country and saw farther to the west a low line of whiterock palisades shaped like wide steps leading to the high plains. There appeared now among the hardwoods scatterings of mesquite and occasional clumps of prickly pear. The west wind carried the scent of cedar and the sunsets seemed a deeper and brighter red, as if painted in fresher blood. The clouds were quicker to shape themselves and to change direction, to dissolve to pale wisps. A hard hailstorm drove him to cover in an oak grove and frightened the Janey mare.

Really, though, In the Rogue Blood is not aiming for the same place in the firmament as Blood Meridian. It is blood-soaked pulp wearing a literary three-piece suit.

The story springs from that oldest of literary genres: a man goes on a journey. In this case, there are two men, Edward and John Little, who leave their home in Florida (fleeing an ex-prostitute, possibly psychotic mother, a violent, possibly psychotic father, and a sister who doesn’t complain much) and set out for the wider world.

In the early going, these two brothers follow a pattern: they fight/kill someone and take that person’s stuff; later they get robbed in turn; and they are forced to fight/kill someone else to get more stuff. This is interspersed with a great deal of sex: with prostitutes, with farmer’s daughters, eventually with the sister.

If this doesn’t sound entirely pleasant – well, it’s not. The protagonist of a novel does not have to be likeable. However, I’m of the opinion that you still must be able to like an unlikeable character. That is, you must be able to empathize with that person on some level. The trouble with John and Edward, at least towards the beginning, is that they both come off as sociopaths. And you can’t empathize with a person who isn’t able to conjure normal human emotions.

Partway through In the Rogue Blood, though, Edward and John take separate paths. From that moment on, the novel really hits its stride. The two brothers are still fairly repellant human beings, yet they show flashes of decency and a depth of kinship that propels the story towards its conclusion.

Through a series of twists and turns, Edward and John end up on opposing sides of the Mexican-American War.

Here, you can see the sharpest divergence between Blake and McCarthy. The borderlands of Blood Meridian are surreal and otherworldly; it feels created. Blake’s American Southwest is just as violent and unhinged, but it is also tethered strongly to the historical record. His recounting of the movements of General Zachary Taylor and General Winfield Scott are accurate as well as blazingly cinematic. Blake’s battle descriptions, especially the battle of Chapultepec (the penultimate act of Scott’s legendary campaign from Vera Cruz to Mexico City) are revelatory. They seem to belong in a big fat novel by Tolstoy, not a slim volume that begins by following the psycho-pades of two murderous brothers. But Blake shifts easily along the literary spectrum. One moment he is describing a beautiful sunset; the next moment one of his characters is slipping it to his sister; a little later there is an epic battle with thousands of soldiers whirling in the dust and heat and blood.

One of the coolest things historical fiction can do is to illuminate the footnotes. In In the Rogue Blood, Blake takes marvelous advantage of the San Patricio Battalion, a unit of the Mexican Army that was populated by European immigrants – including many Irish – who had deserted from the American Army, lured by promises of better pay and free land. Blake’s melding of historical reality to his fictional tale is seamless. Anyone writing historical fiction these days (cough Ken Follett cough) should take note. This is how it’s done.

In many ways, In the Rogue Blood is not for the faint of heart. There’s the aforementioned incest, along with rape and murder, thievery and skullduggery, cursing and general bad manners, and also scalp hunting. But it’s also an enjoyable read. A crazy ride filled with gorgeous descriptions, laconic dialogue, and the simple, timeless themes of blood-ties and violent destiny.

Details Books Toward In the Rogue Blood

Original Title:	In the Rogue Blood ASIN B008CH240M
Edition Language:	English
Literary Awards:	Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction (1997)

Rating Out Of Books In the Rogue Blood

Ratings: 4.05 From 735 Users | 72 Reviews

Write Up Out Of Books In the Rogue Blood

What a read. The word that keeps coming to mind when I think back on this book is raw. Far from a feel good, this book lacks any resemblance of optimism. A tough story with an unhappy ending. That being said, super engrossing and descriptive - when I opened this book it demanded my complete attention. Recommend for those who like reading about the brutal, savage side mankind.

This 344 page book started off with promise. The writing style, the authentic sounding language that harkens back to late 1800s, sounds legit, not over done, and is very compelling. However, it seemed like there were 100s of incidence of extreme violence in this novel, and every one was described in great gory detail. The repeated graphic detailed descriptions of every killing, rape, pillaging, disemboweling, burning, hanging, the lopping off of body parts, the torture, blah, blah, blah became

If you can make it through the rough parts, this is a fantastic book! I think that I'll try "The Friends of Pancho Villa" next.

god. i only read like 50 pages of this book. it was TERRIBLE. let's have a little synopsis, meet two brothers, find out dad killed a man and they all fled to florida, sister runs away mysteriously, brothers go to find sister, come home find house burned down, mom did it, mom tells them dad was raping their sister, mom runs away, they kill dad, and then they ride to texas and are racist, sexist douchebags the whole way. the end.

I really don't know what I really thought about this one. I like Blake but this book gave me the the willies. Could have done without all the sex but that being said it did hold my intention. I thought character development was outstanding but the book was way too long.

Spectauclar, blood-soaked epic that teels the true story of the San Patricios battalion and their part in the Mexican/American war. It's as though Sam Peckinpah had adapted a script by Cormac McCarthy.

This violent, brutal, road Western of a novel has a language of its own, a fustian writing that fits right in. It's commendable, but there are (for me, at least) too many action sequences that were hard to follow. It just never turned out to be the slow-paced, silent-cowboy type of Western that I was hoping for. Still a journey worth taking.