Ghost Town by Robert Coover (Western) ePUB+

In a land of sand, dry rocks, and dead things rides the timeless American hero: a forlorn horseman, "leathery and sunburnt and old as the hills. Yet just a kid. Won't ever be anything else." He drifts into a desert ghost town (or, in a sense, it drifts up to him), where, under an obscure obligation, he must serve as both lawman and outlaw, a performance both outrageously comic and profoundly disturbing, reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's clowns and of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote. All the elements of the Western epic are present--heroes and villains, whores and virgins, gunfights, saloon brawls, high-stakes gambling, bank and train robberies, runaway stage coaches, white stallions and black mares, cattle stampedes, prospectors and bounty hunters, jailbreaks, duels, scalp-hunts and hangings--but all radically transformed by Robert Coover's comic energy. Much as Cervantes's spellbound knight brought an end to the era of the medieval European romance, so does Robert Coover's Ghost Town hero bring down the curtain on this century of the American cowboy.