Photo de l'auteur

Keith C. Blackmore

Auteur de Mountain Man

33 oeuvres 589 utilisateurs 53 critiques 2 Favoris

A propos de l'auteur

Comprend les noms: Keith C. Blackmore

Séries

Œuvres de Keith C. Blackmore

Mountain Man (2011) 135 exemplaires
The Hospital (2012) 88 exemplaires
Safari (2012) — Auteur — 54 exemplaires
Hellifax (2012) 44 exemplaires
Well Fed (2014) 39 exemplaires
The Missing Boatman (2010) 29 exemplaires
Breeds (2014) 26 exemplaires
131 Days (2011) 23 exemplaires
Mountain Man: Prequel (2017) 19 exemplaires
The Troll Hunter (2010) 17 exemplaires
Make Me King (2019) 14 exemplaires
Mindless (2021) 11 exemplaires
The Bear That Fell From The Stars (2011) 11 exemplaires
White Sands, Red Steel (2012) 10 exemplaires
Cauldron Gristle (2011) 9 exemplaires
Breeds 2 (Breeds, #2) (2016) 8 exemplaires
The Majestic 311 (2019) 8 exemplaires
Breeds 3 (Breeds, #3) (2016) 5 exemplaires
Mountain Man Omnibus: (Books 1-3) (2018) 5 exemplaires
131 Days: House of Pain (Book 2) (2014) 2 exemplaires
Mountain Man Prequel 2 exemplaires
131 Days: Leeches (2011) 1 exemplaire
Private Property 1 exemplaire
Ten (131 Days #2) 1 exemplaire

Étiqueté

Partage des connaissances

Sexe
male

Membres

Critiques

Despite the name, trolls don’t seem to quite fit into the author’s conjured up medieval world. The single troll’s appearance is never explained, their history open to speculation.
Otherwise, strong start - strong finale. That leaves the middle part which, unfortunately, hangs through and crawls on its belly.
In fact, everything about the book is a bit inconsistent. Some characters are well developed, some aren’t. Some descriptions are well-done, others seem just added as an afterthought.
Much is quite predictable, the ending is not.
If you can get through dry phases and the corny, unrealistic stuff, there will be highlights to enjoy.
… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
nitrolpost | 2 autres critiques | Mar 19, 2024 |
A routine zombie apocalypse story, Keith C. Blackmore's Mountain Man can't rise above its clichés to provide a truly exciting read. Its titular character is a hard-drinking, wise-cracking bro, and the novel is filled with run-of-the-mill zombie-killing action, stale banter and tedious bouts of drinking. There's little insight into the character; instead we get scatological humour, and I lost track of how many times Gus, the titular 'mountain man', scratches his balls or downs a bottle of whiskey. A scene where Gus and his companion laugh about one of them shitting their pants, with it "squishin' between my ass cheeks" (pg. 97), suggested to me that, at 33 years old, I might be about two decades removed from the book's target audience.

Mountain Man is written with a reasonable level of skill, given the low bar of the genre, but it stumbles when it tries to break into anything deeper. (Gus' heavy drinking is made light of rather than addressed, with an early reference to not wanting to become like his alcoholic father (pg. 8) being dropped from the rest of the story. Another character's revelation on page 171 that he had to kill his wife and daughter early in the zombie outbreak is artlessly done.) There's a story thread about a serial killer which is created but then left unresolved – no doubt for a sequel novel – and there's no other throughline in the story. The novel's an uninspiring – though agreeable enough – sequence of Gus roaming around an apocalyptic city, killing zombies with a bat or a shotgun, before returning to his ridiculously perfect mountain hideout (which he just happened to stumble upon a few days after the apocalypse) with fortifications, running water, solar panels and even a hard-drive filled with movies. There's a full stock of gas in the garage, a full inventory of medical drugs and supplies and, at one point, our survivor goes out to find a jackpot of weapons and ammunition.

The only thing he lacks, of course, are stakes – some jeopardy or conflict for a reader to invest in. With his mountain-hideout base camp and his fully-stocked armoury and medicine cabinet all in place as we start the story, it's like we're dropping in on somebody playing a video game with all the stats already maxed out. Reading Mountain Man's routine action scenes and safe banter, I felt like I was reading a narrative of a few levels of a video game, a zombie-killing RPG or first-person shooter. I imagine there's an audience for that, but I'll be moving along down the road.
… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
MikeFutcher | 14 autres critiques | Oct 15, 2023 |
I don't know what it is about people wanting to write stories about the most average, most boring people on the planet doing something super exciting. But it makes for pretty boring stories. Who'd have thought.

RC Bray does an amazing job narrating, as usual, which I think injected some much needed humor into the story. (I've listened to him narrate an Ed Gein documentary and honestly, same vibes.) I got way more into it after an hour when Scotty and Tenner showed up. I was not ready for it!… (plus d'informations)
 
Signalé
nydhoggyr | 14 autres critiques | May 17, 2022 |
As the subtitle says, this is a “very weird western”.

It opens with a classic western motif: a train robbery.

Leland Baxter’s and his six men are sketched quickly with Blackmore’s typically skillful dialogue.

Baxter is a natural leader of men, opposed to unnecessary violence, and willing to let his men complain – even if he doesn’t do anything about their complaints. Former circus strongman “Shorty” Charlie Williams is his taciturn and loyal henchman. Another of his friends is James “Jimmy” Norquay, former buffalo hunter, who met Baxter in a residential school for Indians Norquay being a Metis. Mackenzie Cass is a cattle rustler possessed of surprising bits of learning. Gilbert Butler is a gunrunner from America. His partner is the volatile, profane, and frequently insolent Eli Gallant. The last is our protagonist, orphan Nathan Rhodes, who once sought a career as a lawman before killing a boy who resisted arrest.

It’s a cold, wintery night in the Canadian Rockies. There’s a train from Canada bound for western Canada with the payroll of a mining company. And, since it has to slow to start climbing the Spirals, a winding tunnel going through the Rockies, it’s the perfect place to hop on it.

That’s the plan. But when Nathan and Baxter find a literally skeletal engineer in the cab – who opens the throttle up before leaping over the side, and the rest of the gang find way too many cars and no passengers, things get strange.

And Blackmore keeps them strange with the train itself, as Rhodes notes, becoming a rabbit hole, a portal to other worlds.

Around the middle of the book, things get science fictional with a humorous interlude. And, at the end, things get magical.

I can’t say anymore lest I ruin Blackmore’s surprises. The gang is going to expend lots of ammo and dynamite before things are over. And, of course, not everyone is going to live through the story. The dialogue of sometimes contentious men, largely strangers to each other, bonding other pressure is good.

This book moves briskly. It’s 367 pages long, and I read it in a day.

But, however much the train accelerated and things got weirder and weirder, the whole thing had the feeling of a lot of scenes from other stories strung together and that the train and its story wasn’t going to end up, for me at least, at a satisfactory place.

And I was right.

To be sure, Blackmore laid the tracks for his ending. It’s coherent. I appreciated that Blackmore worked science fictional elements into the story even if its underlying rationale is just magical, but I found the conclusion a letdown and elements of it morally vague.

Still, I’d be curious to read another weird western from Blackmore.
… (plus d'informations)
1 voter
Signalé
RandyStafford | May 26, 2021 |

Vous aimerez peut-être aussi

Auteurs associés

R. C. Bray Narrator

Statistiques

Œuvres
33
Membres
589
Popularité
#42,598
Évaluation
½ 3.7
Critiques
53
ISBN
16
Favoris
2

Tableaux et graphiques