Melbourne

I've been getting into Westerns recently. I read Blood Meridian a little while ago and it's such a slog of a book. I wasn't into the genre much before but it feels so antithetical to all the regular tropes.

I just finished Be Cool by Elmore Leonard as well. It's not a Western but he's written a lot of them and you can see the style crossover. I thought I was reading the first Chili Palmer book, so I'll need to go back and read Get Shorty, as well as some of his Westerns.

I've also started reading the Vampire Hunter D collection I got as a result as well. It's interesting seeing the prose difference. Vampire Hunter D has such purple prose that's trying to read fancy and doesn't hit the mark at all. Be Cool had simple writing that allows it to flow. And Blood Meridian was almost too simple in that it felt plodding and hard to read because of how flat it was.

I'm also reading True Grit now because I watched the Cohen Brothers movie when it came out. They're very good at the gritty Western so I thought I'd check out the source material.

I feel like a Western is more than its American West aesthetics. There are themes of a frontier, colonialism, expansion, and areas of little to no rule of law. Westerns are very American, but a story can feel like a Western without being set in that specific time and place.