BOOK REVIEW: Blood and Spurs: Book One: The Blood Rider by Mark Tarrant (2007)

Review by Scott Lefebvre

     It began with an e-mail.

     Mark Tarrant sent an e-mail to Rob Galluzzo at Icons of Fright asking about submitting his book for review.   Rob redirected the author in my direction as the resident book reviewer at Icons and I appreciate that.   It’s nice to know you work with people that respect and appreciate what you’re doing.

     I received an e-mail from Mark Tarrant in which he humbly asked if I would be kind enough to review his book.   A humility that is unusual in authors, but the author openly admits that this is his first book, his first shot out of the barrel, and he is understandably uncertain about where the strange journey will take him.

     I wasn’t unaware of the author and his book.   At the Fangoria Weekend of Horrors where I started talking with Joe Sena from Fearwerx about working his booth at conventions, Mark Tarrant had the next booth over and it was difficult not to notice the author, a stocky, genial, pitbull of a man in a black cowboy hat boldly promoting the book which he had created.   I remembered the author and his book which seemed like it was a cross-genre experiment combining vampires and cowboys.   Not a bad idea, but one that could be executed for good or for awful depending on the skill of the author.

     So Mark and I had a quick back and forth where I gave him my mailing address.   Then there was the week of waiting till one sunshiny day I received the book a week later in a padded manila envelope.   With the book was a letter on “Blood and Spurs” letterhead.   I have to admit it was kind of cool.   The letter was touching in the way that it waxed apologetic and promotional in turns.

     “What’s funny is guys who review, like you, are so much better at English than I am, and they know how to write.”   Well, Mark, I don’t know how to say this, but it’s all guesswork at a keyboard.   We hunt and peck and figure it out one word at a time just like you do.   Your humble approach is touching, but I’m sure that I’m not the first to tell you that you should be goddamned proud of what you’ve accomplished.   It’s not everyone that can write a book, much less three.   To paraphrase Henry Rollins paraphrasing Ernest Hemingway, most reviewers are like people that watch a battle from a safe distance then come in and finish off the wounded.   You’ve fought the good fight, returning from the trenches with stories to tell, and you’ve got a right to enjoy the pride of accomplishment.   Especially since you’ve written something worth reading.

     “I just hope you like Ezekiel as a character and see what I was trying to do, make a fun horror western adventure like Conan stories or The Spider from the 40s.”   I did like Ezekiel as a character.   So much so that I want to know who you’ve got in mind to write the prequel to your series, because if you aren’t saving that special opportunity for yourself, I’d love to throw my black leather cowboy hat in the ring.   I got what you were trying to do, and your books are a worthy addition to the legacy of pulp adventure novels.   A legacy often ignored as dated or exhausted by contemporary authors.   By striving to define themselves and seeking their own voice, they forget their heritage and the wealth of creativity and the unlimited possibility offered by the creation and introduction of an iconic character.

     But enough about Mark and I.   What about the book?

     I brought the book along with me when I went to get the head liner of my car re-upholstered.   I read the book in its entirety that day.   Although I brought the book along with a couple others as a combination of killing time and fulfilling a commitment, I was quickly swept up by the story.

     The character of Ezekiel is indeed iconic.   Imagine Stephen King’s Roland from The Dark Tower series as a vampire and you get an idea of what the character is like.   The kind of confident, capable, rugged, sturdy, manly, archetype like Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name trilogy, or Toshiro Mifune in the Samurai swordsman films which inspired Leone.   The same mold that the Marvel Comics characters Wolverine and The Punisher were cast from.   And for my money, I’d rather spend my time with The Blood Rider instead of The Ghost Rider.   I know that’s a bold statement, but I’ve put it out there and I’m standing by it.

     The author begins the first of his three novel series with the origin of Ezekiel.   A religious young man in a religious family making their way westward with the earnest intentions of establishing a church to save the sinners populating the wild west.   The family is beset upon by a group of mercilessly desperate bandits and left to die in the barren wilderness, but Ezekiel becomes the fast repast of an anonymous vampire whose darkly sardonic outlook inspires the vampire to bestow the immortality of vampirism upon the young pious Ezekiel.   This is the crux that defines the character.   A man who is fervently faithful becomes ironically, contrastingly, blessed and cursed with the power and burden of vampirism and immortality.   It’s so simple, it’s elegant, and where a lesser author may have taken a less interesting direction from this point of departure, Mark Tarrant infuses the character with a sense of conflict and pathos and anger and sadness that I found myself eager to know how Ezekiel would come to terms with the dualism inherent in the origin of his character.   But that’s a story for another time.

     The story picks up in the third chapter, twenty years later.   A man named William Hamilton, a frontier era Ichabod Crane archetype, a school teacher from New York is searching for his brother who went missing in the wasteland of the wild west.   To aid him in his search, he is seeking ‘El Diablo Blanco’.

     ‘El Diablo Blanco’ is what Ezekiel has become.   The intervening years have been filled with his coming to terms with his conflicting religious and vampiric characteristics and bringing those who cold-bloodedly murdered his family to justice, although these intervening years are only alluded to in this installment.

     Ezekiel has established a comfortable life for himself as the dark angelic protector of a small Mexican town where prostitutes and gambling are close at hand and the bandits have learned that the town is off limits to their predation lest they incur the wrath of ‘the white devil’.

     Ezekiel’s comfort is disrupted by the arrival of William Hamilton whose earnest appeals overcome Ezekiel’s resistance.   Ezekiel decides to take a vacation from his eternal dissolution to aid the school teacher who would otherwise be easy prey for the rugged residents of the wild west.

     I’d love to tell you more.   But instead I recommend that you read it for yourself.

     It’s not fancy.   But neither was Ernest Hemingway.    Or Charles Bukowski.

     The writing is clean enough that the book is safe for the PG-13 crowd, but interesting enough to capture the attention of adults as well.   At the very least I proudly admit the book to be more than just a guilty pleasure and if I had children that were awesome like I was when I was a kid, when I couldn’t read enough Stephen King novels, then I’d give them this first novel and buy the next two so I could have a couple nice surprises for them down the line when they hinted that they wanted them.

     Let me put it this way.   I’ve read all of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, well, up until the Order of the Phoenix, and after the fourth or fifth one, the characters began to wear on me.   They seemed priggish and overly self-involved.   After reading a couple thousand pages I just didn’t care if Harry and Hermione would ever get together or if the Weasleys would ever stop being so redundantly destitute.   Voldemort is the best part of the books and he only gets about a thirtieth of the page count.   At least Tarrant gives us the good, the bad, and the ugly all in one book and it’s not just foreplay with the possible promise of fooling around if we buy the next book.   Instead The Blood Rider is like a hot first date that leaves you looking forward to the next installment.

     The story arc, following the characters as they try to solve the mystery of the disappearance of the school teacher’s brother plays out a bit like a Nancy Drew mystery at times.   But the attraction of this novel is not so much the strength of the story as it is the journey of the characters.   At its most basic it is the story of two men who are evolving as a result of their interactions.   It’s the same kind of energy that made Batman and Robin such a successful duo, but it avoids the latent homosexual subtext that plagued the caped crusaders.   The dark knight and the young student.   I came to know and like the characters enough that when the book drew to a close, I wish that they would hang around a little longer.

     This brings me to the excerpt from the second book, Blood and Spurs: Book Two: Fort Doom.

     From what I can tell, it seems that the author has chosen to continue to follow Ezekiel and William Hamilton in their adventures across the wild west.

     I’m interested.   I liked the characters and I would like to read more about them.

     Even if the third book is more of the same I would be pleased to read that one too.

     In short, I’m a fan.

     But more than anything else, I want to know more about the vampire that created Ezekiel and the intervening years which passed between the origin of Ezekiel and where the story of the first book picks up.   I want to know about those years of blood and gunsmoke when Ezekiel ran with a pack of vampire bandits, slaking their thirst for human blood on the moonlit frontier.   I want to know where and when and how Ezekiel executed the bitter justice against the group of bandits who prematurely ended the lives of his family and his wife.   I want to know about the character’s heartache and fury, his sadness and anger when it was burning most intensely.   Because it seems that when we rejoin Ezekiel, he has become a creature whose fire has burned down to glowing embers and ash.   He has come to terms with the precarious relationship he must maintain with the rest of humanity and it takes the introduction of William Hamilton to break Ezekiel out of the comfortable consistency that he has created for himself.

     I want to know about it so badly that I want to write it.

     I want to know so badly that I’m already imagining it.

     The opportunity to have a hand in the development of such an iconic character only happens once or twice in a lifetime.

     So if you’re out there, Mark Tarrant, and you read this, call me.

     Because if you don’t finish what you’ve started and tell me the tale that I so badly want to hear I’m going to have to do it myself.

     You’ve got a gift.

     I’m a fan.

     Don’t leave me hanging.

     Let’s ride.

More on the internet:

Mark Tarrant: www.thesmilingviking.com or

The Blood Rider: www.thebloodrider.com or http://www.myspace.com/thebloodrider

About the Author:

     Mark Tarrant is a creative powerhouse who knew he wanted to write from his first encounter with Star Wars. Born in Lansing, Michigan, Tarrant grew up loving books about monsters and the unknown. A big fan of comics − especially those of Robert E. Howard’s Conan character − his reading eventually included the master of horror, Stephen King. His storytelling is also influenced by his passion for Western movies, particularly The Good, The Bad & The Ugly.

     His artistic talents have received recognition in The Boston Globe, USA Today, The Valley Advocate, The Republican, The Herald and The Buzz.

     With the debut of his Blood & Spurs series, Tarrant introduces us to an intriguing character − the Blood Rider, a vampire in the Wild West.  Once a man of God, the Blood Rider now roams the West dispensing his own brand of justice. Lovers of a good story with a fantasy twist will find a compelling new hero from the very first volume, The Blood Rider.

     Tarrant’s personal life is a sharp contrast to the fantasy world that captivates his readers. He lives in Western Massachusetts, loves history and pop culture, and gets especially excited during NFL season. Tarrant has recently discovered another creative passion: parenting his daughter Haley. Being a new father has given him another platform for storytelling.

About the Reviewer:

Scott Lefebvre can write about whatever you want him to write about.
Mostly because when he was grounded for his outlandish behavior as a hyperactive school child, the only place he was allowed to go was the public library.
His literary tastes were forged by the works of Helen Hoke, Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammell, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Stephen King, Clive Barker, Edgar Allan Poe, and H. P. Lovecraft.
He is the author of Spooky Creepy Long Island, and a contributing author to Forrest J. Ackerman’s Anthology of the Living Dead, Fracas: A Collection of Short Friction, The Call of Lovecraft, and Cashiers du Cinemart.
He is currently working on ten novel-length book projects which will be released in 2014.
He also publishes themed collections of interviews from his interview blog You Are Entitled To My Opinion.
His reviews have been published by a variety of in print and online media including Scars Magazine, Icons of Fright, Fatally Yours and Screams of Terror, and he has appeared in Fangoria, Rue Morgue and HorrorHound Magazine.
He is the Assistant Program Director for The Arkham Film Society and produces electronic music under the names Master Control and LOVECRAFTWORK.
He is currently working on a novel-length expansion of a short-story titled, "The End Of The World Is Nigh", a crowd-funded, crowd-sourced, post-apocalyptic, zombie epidemic project.
Check out the blog for the book here: theendoftheworldisnighbook.blogspot.com
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