Haunted Mesa by Louis L'Amour

Though the cover features a katchina
dancer, they never really come up in the
book. I've read that the katchina cult,
which seems strongest among the modern
Hopi, is something of an innovation. At
any rate, it has its own complicated and
little-known history.

I just did something I thought I'd never do: I read a Louis L'Amour novel.

Louis L'Amour, if you don't know, is arguably the all-time most popular writer of westerns. He wrote 89 novels in all, a number of which were turned into films and television shows. His presence, though increasingly tattered and faded, was inescapable for someone growing up in Texas in the eighties and nineties, which I did. But I've had an aversion to westerns as long as I can remember, and I was never tempted to crack open one of the zillions of L'Amour paperbacks underfoot back then.

(Perhaps my aversion dates from the time we got free 3D movie glasses from the county courthouse to watch a 3D John Wayne movie on the local UHF station. I think it was Hondo, which is based on a L'Amour story. Our county seat happened to be called Hondo as well...! Anyway, I remember looking over at my family, all gaping at the TV screen with big grins on their faces, and silently removing my own glasses, content to watch the movie in overlapping red-and-blue, which gave me a headache. But did I really need John Wayne's horse's nose popping out of the screen at me?)

Anyway, recent events have conspired to soften my old contempt, the primary one being my ill-considered decision to begin writing "Weird Westerns" myself. So I'd already been toying with the idea of picking up a L'Amour novel or two when I learned that L'Amour himself had written a science fiction novel set in the Four Corners area!

Haunted Mesa, which came out in 1987 and appears to have been the author's last novel, combines the parallel universe conceit with elements of modern Puebloan and ancient Mayan mythology to explicate the mysterious disappearance of the Anasazi¹ from cultural centers like Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon. Since I've taken my own stab at that sort of thing, and have driven and camped around the Four Corners region too many times to count², I headed over to our beloved county library and checked it out.

The novel tells the story of Mike Raglan, a middle-aged professional debunker-of-mysterious-claims, who's called to a remote mesa in Navajo country by the frantic summons of his friend Erik Hokart, an eccentric but wealthy inventor. Hokart has been living on the mesa with the intent of building a house there, but the discovery of mysterious ruins, including a well-preserved kiva with a strange window, has precipitated events resulting in his disappearance. It gradually unfolds that he's held prisoner in a parallel universe, the Third World from which the ancient Anasazi emerged into our world, the Fourth World, and to which they subsequently returned. Raglan spends the first two thirds of the novel investigating the disappearance on this side of the veil, and the last third in his rescue attempt on the Other Side.

All in all, Haunted Mesa was an enjoyable novel that kept me turning the pages. Unfortunately, it has more plot holes than interdimensional portals, and more loose ends than desert jeep trails. I won't bore you with the details, but if you're someone who notices things like that, they'll jump out at you on every page. Just one example: the story begins with Raglan reading Hokart's journal, which takes him right up to the very instant Hokart was abducted from a cafe. If we pause to reflect on this, we're forced to picture Hokart leaning over the cashier's counter, writing, while shadowy forces are seizing him and firebombing the building.

Incidentally, the novel's opening chapters remind me strongly of William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland. Come to think of it, the discovered journal in Borderland also ends with an absurd account of the writer's last minutes. Here's to dedicated diarists! In Haunted, though, the atmosphere of mystery and doom is quickly dissipated by a night at a resort condo.

L'Amour was a veteran writer, and I assume that issues like the ones I describe above don't represent his best work. Did he have a hard time transitioning from westerns to something set in the modern world? That can't be it. After all, he also wrote plenty of well-regarded crime stories. He died of lung cancer the very next year, so perhaps he was simply suffering from ill health. It's possible that the bulk of the book was drafted much earlier, and that he simply put together what he had to get it out there while he still could. That's just speculation, of course.

There's a lot of historical exposition, mostly consisting of the kinds of things you might have heard from a Mesa Verde park ranger circa 1987. (I camped at Mesa Verde in 1991, 2001, and 2017, and the ranger talks were different every time. Not so much in facts as in assertions and interpretations.³) These digressions are fairly repetitive and sometimes last through multiple pages. They often begin, for no discernible reason, right in the middle of the action. It struck me that a little critical editing could have made the narrative considerably tighter.

One thing I appreciate about Haunted Mesa is how conscious it is of place. Settings are described with vivid, concrete details. The plot unfolds, not against some vague southwestern backdrop, but at specific geographical locations. Actually, most of it reads like L'Amour took a trip to the area, stayed at a certain resort near Cortez, Colorado, drove (or had himself driven) up and down certain roads, and plotted his story around what he saw, which...I'm pretty sure is exactly what he did. Still, it's not a bad effect.

I took the contour map inside the back cover and (because I'm old-school like that) compared it to my folding AAA Indian Country Map, locating all the roads and landmarks mentioned in the text. Then, because I'm not an absolute luddite, I found it all on Google Earth. In case you're curious, the novel begins on a disused dirt road paralleling No Man's Mesa and passing through 37° 10' 1" N, 110° 29' 27" W; the coordinates of the haunted mesa itself are 37° 14' 30" N, 110° 31' 58" W, though I think L'Amour conflates it with the neighboring Nokai Dome when it suits him. Are all his novels that specific, I wonder? Maybe I'll find out. Or maybe not.

Without a doubt, the best part of the novel is the last third, when Raglan finally ventures into the Third World. I don't mind a bit that L'Amour took so long to get him there, because I think these things are best when nicely built up. There he teams up with a female Anasazi leader, a grizzled but genteel old cowboy trapped in the Third World for decades, and various other characters, encountering unknown technologies, a "modern" Chacoan city, a mysterious, giant-lizard-infested ruined city more ancient than Egypt or Babylon, a vast labyrinth / government palace / temple complex / library filled with traps and armed enemies, and an impending "spacequake." Pretty awesome.

So, yeah, despite the issues which a bit of good editing could have taken care of, I'm going to give Haunted Mesa a two-thumbs-up.

*

But hey, since we're on the topic of the Four Corners region, how about some pictures from my latest vacation??? We made a big counterclockwise loop, beginning with Chaco Culture National Historic Park, which lies at the end of thirty miles of rough washboard road.

Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon. It's famous for the its "sun dagger"
petroglyph, which appears to have been used by ancestral Puebloans to

mark the equinoxes and solstices. The site has shifted due to hordes of
people tramping up there to see it, and is now closed to visitors. Another
casualty of the Cultural Uncertainty Principle.

A great kiva in the Casa Rinconada complex in Chaco Canyon. Nowadays it's
theorized that the canyon served as a kind of center for ceremony and trade.

A famous view in the Pueblo Bonito complex, the largest and most intricate
of the Great Houses in Chaco Canyon. It was inhabited for about 300 years
before being abandoned in the twelfth century.

I've read that Pueblo Bonito was carefully oriented according to the solar
cycle. You can get a better idea of the grandeur of the structure from this
aerial view.

Chaco Canyon at sunset, looking toward Pueblo Bonito from Pueblo del
Arroyo.

A reconstructed great kiva at the incorrectly named Aztec Ruins National
Historic Site, which lies between Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde. This is
something like what the ruined kiva above might have resembled.

Mesa Verde from Balcony House. Though mostly famous for its cliff dwellings,
Mesa Verde is just as remarkable for its geology. It's a giant table of rock,
tilted toward the south, with immense cliffs along its western edge, where it
towers over the desert. From its highest point you can see Shiprock in New
Mexico.

Cliff Palace, the most famous of the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, abandoned
sometime before 1300.

Mesa Verde, looking south along Navajo Canyon.

Canyon de Chelly, which is in the Navajo Nation, in Arizona. The Navajo
still farm and herd at the bottom of the canyon, which is mostly closed
to visitors. The cliffs are sheer and tower 600 to 700 feet.

Spider Rock in Canyon de Chelly. The canyon was home to ancestral
Puebloans before the coming of the Navajo.

El Morro, a site frequented by travelers in northwestern New Mexico since
prehistoric times. Visitors came for the water, but left records of their passage
in the form of inscriptions on the walls. The ruins of a pueblo occupy the top,
and the Ancestral Puebloans left the earliest petroglyphs.

The waters of El Morro.

The oldest Spanish inscription, left by Juan de Oñate, conquistador and first
governor of New Mexico, in 1605. He's famous mostly for his massacre of
Acoma Pueblo, in which 800 Acoma were killed, and after which all male
prisoners over the age of twenty-five were sentenced to have their right foot
cut off. Oñate was later banished from New Mexico and exiled from Mexico
City for his use of excessive force.

Modern pueblos I've visited include Taos, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Santo Domingo, Jemez, Zuñi, and Shongopavi (on the Hopi Reservation). The first and last mentioned are among the oldest continuously inhabited dwellings in the United States. Someone I talked to on the Hopi Reservation told me that, according to their traditions, their villages existed contemporaneously with the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, and that they absorbed some of the subsequent diaspora. Their kivas are square-shaped.

¹ Nowadays the term ancestral Puebloan seems preferable to Anasazi, which is a Navajo term. The "disappearance" L'Amour talks so much about, and which was mentioned quite often when I toured the area in 1991, is now typically ascribed to migration. The modern pueblos are held to be at least partially descended from the "Anasazi" cultures, an explanation that seemingly wasn't taken seriously back then, but is now.

² Actually, it's not too many times to count. I think it's eight.

³ Listen, everyone! Tour guides are not experts! I repeat, tour guides are not experts! They are friendly people who've memorized a number of facts and know how to answer silly questions while keeping tourists from climbing over things. That applies to most park rangers!

Hard at Work or...

Let's take a little break from our long-winded castigations of much-loved children's book authors to take a look at what I've been working on lately.

First exhibit, the cover of my upcoming book The King of Nightspore's Crown:

Ha ha ha, just kidding. (I probably had too much fun making that.) Here is the actual painting, in its current state of completion:

For your viewing pleasure, here's a close-up of the lovely mosses:

and here's the two dudes fighting:

As you can see, I've got some Oceanic and Central American influences going on here. Wouldn't this make a cool movie? I'd go see it. Maybe I'll try to interest Guillermo del Toro in optioning the series. If that works out, I'll probably insist that Doug Jones portray at least some of the abhuman characters.

I'm still leaning toward making the left-hand side of this image the front cover, which would maybe look something like this:

As I hope is abundantly clear, I'm still going for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy look. The design's a bit busy, perhaps, but that's kind of my trademark.

*

I've been listening to Joseph Conrad while painting, which seems fitting. I've also been re-listening to the Imaro books, in anticipation of acquiring the further volumes. Something about the Imaro stories reminds me of the freshness of the old pulps. No doubt this owes partly to the newness of the setting, but there's an earnest seriousness to Saunders' stories that puts me in mind of Robert E. Howard. I like the wilderness stories the best.

A reader objected the other day to attempts to "erase" authors from history. Regular readers of my blog know that, while I may get in a high dudgeon about this or that, I'm quite shameless when it comes to filling my own skull with garbage. I would also defend to the death (or some such rhetorical extremity) the right of the writer to depict the ugly side of life in an ambiguous way. And I don't apologize for reading and liking authors who hold opinions that I or others regard as morally repugnant.

But that doesn't mean that commenting on authors' viewpoints is off-limits, either. It's a free country!

So, suppose you get irritated by something that pervades an author's work – an author you happen to really like on the whole. You want to do something about it. There's a few things you can try. You can grouse about it on your blog, and see where that gets you. That's one approach. You can repudiate and utterly contemn the author's works and urge others to do so. We might call this the bonfire-of-the-vanities approach. Or you can just write your own awesome stories in the same genre, with a certain amount of subversion and subtle commentary.

Which seems like the most fun?

Inspired by such ruminations, I here announce the inception of an alternate-history sword-and-sorcery subgenre set during the time of the Spanish conquests. Of course my protagonist will hail from Puerto Rico. Of course he will be of mixed ancestry. And of course his adventures will take him across an alternate Texas in search of God, gold, and glory. Just like me!

After careful consideration, I propose "sword-and-santería" as a name for the subgenre, having briefly considered but ultimately rejected the "arquebus-and-sorcery" label. I've written one story so far, set in the location of the town where I live. From here I think he will wander out to the painted canyons of the west, to encounter cosmic weirdness and mete out sudden vengeance. No doubt his perambulations will eventually take him to all the really interesting places in the American Southwest, Mexico, and Central America. It's Conrad and Cather meet Howard and Lovecraft, Kane and Conan meet Coronado and Cortés. I wish my antihero luck in his morally dubious adventures.

Bone Tomahawk

Did you know that there were two westerns starring Kurt Russell last fall? There was Quentin Tarantino's The Hateful Eight, and then there was S. Craig Zahler's Bone Tomahawk. The latter was an indie film by a first-time director. It did well at festivals but had only a limited release, meaning that there was zero chance for me to see it in the theater. But I finally watched it on the small screen the other night, and, dang, that was a good movie.

First off, I have to say that I'm not a huge fan of westerns. This is not due to lack of exposure. Quite the contrary, perhaps. I live half an hour from the Alamo Village movie set, where they filmed both the John Wayne film and Lonesome Dove. Growing up, I watched John Wayne movies until I had them memorized. When the local UHF station featured one in 3D (I forget which), we actually went out to the county courthouse – in a different town, mind you – to pick up the glasses to watch it as a family. There's some good old-fashioned red-blooded American fun for you. (It was like John Wayne's horse's nose was popping right out at us!) But, sadly, I simply can't stand westerns now. At least ones that don't involve some combination of Sergio Leone or Clint Eastwood.

However, Bone Tomahawk is better described as a horror-western, certainly an unusual combination of genres. It's like The Searchers stitched by a degenerate backwoods psychopath onto The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. So here let me also say that I'm not the target audience for brutal slasher horror films. So, why would I like Bone Tomahawk so much?

Well, I first became interested in it when I encountered this interview with the director. In it he trashes both The Hateful Eight and The Revenant, and explains that what inspired the story "comes a little bit more from the disciplines of lost race fiction, like H. Rider Haggard kind of stuff, really, than from westerns."

H. Rider Haggard kind of stuff? Sign me up!

So, the basic plot is this: A young foreman's wife (who happens to be a doctor) gets kidnapped by a tribe of degenerate cannibal troglodytes. The sheriff (Kurt Russell, who is and will always be awesome) forms a mismatched little posse to rescue her. They cross the wilderness, experiencing various Old West setbacks, and then step right into the mouth of Hell.

Really, most of film consists of these four men riding across the landscape with each other. The characters are well drawn and quite enjoyable to watch. The mood is quiet and brooding, with a rising sense of menace as they get deeper and deeper into this back corner of the wilderness. The horror is only hinted at until the last thirty minutes or so of the film. And then...hold onto your chair. Seriously, don't watch this movie if you're sensitive to graphic violence. I've never seen anything like it. What makes it hard to watch is that the characters never lose their basic humanity in the viewer's eyes. There's no emotional detachment, as you might have in a straight-up slasher. But the horror is also offset by a kind of grim but compassionate humor. And Kurt Russell is the man.

The main feature, of course, is the cannibal troglodytes. There's a lot to love here, but I don't want to say too much. They're very scary and very cool. And I love this idea of riding deeper and deeper into the American wilderness, encountering stranger and stranger things as you go, until you come to the final horror of all. In the interview mentioned above, Zahler says this:

If I could have picked anywhere to shoot this movie, probably my first choice would have been New Mexico, and certainly the thing I am least happy with in the entire movie are the exterior locations [...] I had a very specific geographical progression throughout this movie from hills and green, to flatter and green, to green and dirt, to dirt and red, to white, to rocky, to an almost primordial setting that someone compared to Journey to the Center of the Earth. It was very specific in the script how the landscape was supposed to progress, and I spent an enormous amount of time going around with different people in Los Angeles trying to find the best substitutions I could.

Too bad. I can just imagine what he could have done with a free choice of locations in New Mexico, where I've traveled, camped, and backpacked more times than I can count. But he does a very fine job with what he has at his disposal, and it's just a beautiful, beautiful movie.

So, if you want something a little different, but well worth your while if you like H. Rider Haggard kind of stuff, give Bone Tomahawk a chance. (It's currently available for free streaming if you have Amazon Prime.)