Also, I don’t generally read western novels. I keep meaning to. I read The Shootist a while ago and it was wonderful. My hometown library in my last hometown had an enormous shelf of westerns, and although I admit half of them looked unreadable, of the half that looked readable, several looked good. But I never got around to reading them, and so my knowledge of westerns is partially from movies (and I’ve seen only a handful of the classics and almost none of the less-than-classics that of course form the bulk of the tropes and cultural vocabulary) and mostly from parodies, and referentless references. I have seen a few John Wayne movies; I’ve seen hundreds of John Wayne parodies and impersonations. I’ve seen perhaps two movies with Gabby Hayes; I’ve seen Blazing Saddles ten times or more. I think I’m in the big group here, not the small one, but as usual, I can’t tell.
That makes a book like Rangergirl tricky. It’s riffing off a set of things I primarily know from people riffing off them. I get the big stuff (I think), but I don’t get the small stuff, and I’m really only assuming that there is small stuff to get.
The plot (and Here Be Spoylers) essentially involves an artist who has sufficient imaginative force (think Green Lantern) to force the mysterious anti-life-force to conform to her expectations. The way this particular force works is—well, you know how in Ghostbusters when Gozer forces them to choose what form he takes, and Ray thinks of the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man? It’s kind of like that. The main character, Marzi, is somehow given the role of Guardian, and because of that, the evil-thing has to conform to the way her mind works. Because she’s hipped to the Western thing, he becomes The Outlaw, and she becomes RangerGirl. Much of the book involves her figuring all this out, and Marzi finding ways to use her power. In the end, she forces a showdown, which doesn’t work the way anybody plans (thank goodness).
Although Marzi can’t fundamentally change the Outlaw, she can greatly restrict his range of action by forcing him into the formula Western. The book becomes about the use of those formulas. I mean, the whole upending the paradigm thing is not just a part of the reader’s intellectual interpretation of the book, it’s a plot point. That’s quite clever. But I didn’t buy into it as much as I wanted to, because in the end, they weren’t formulae I cared about very much. The question of how far Marzi can stretch the thing without violating it (which would cause the destruction of Santa Cruz and the West Coast, although oddly, not the rest of the world or even the Midwest, where a lot of the books are set) would interest me far more in, say, a Edwardian Country-House novel or a High Fantasy or a Space Opera.
Anyway. I was also taken aback by how seriously Tim Pratt took the scary bits. I had in a lot of ways expected a romp, and it’s not a romp at all, even though there are funny bits and funny characters. He’s going for actually creepy, not mock creepy, and he achieves it (as far as I’m concerned), which wasn’t what I was expecting, and may not have been a good thing for the book.
There. Enough complaining. It’s a good book, for all of that, and I enjoyed reading it, and am happy to own a copy, and will undoubtedly read it again sometime, after which Gentle Readers will know how it looks from the far end.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.