This is the second Oakley Hall novel I've read (after Warlock), and I find that his books are so different from other historical novels that I can hardly review this one without comparing it with that one. As in Warlock, there is that uncanny sense of rightness to every word the characters speak. The slang is often unfamiliar but somehow seems perfect to the period—I can't understand every word, but then if I were dropped into the 1880s, I wouldn't be able to, either, would I? Once in a while I do understand something, and it's always convincing and period-appropriate. One character exclaims "I'd rather ride through Hell in a celluloid suit," which makes sense when you reflect that before gasoline was a everyday substance, celluloid was about the most flammable thing anybody ever heard of. And it's not just the slang and the idioms. The dialogue, sometimes together with a briefly described physical gesture, has a quietly skillful way of telling you exactly what a character is feeling without the narrator having to spell it out. All the characters, even the minor ones, are extremely vivid.

Unlike Warlock, this isn't an epic, despite its eccentric division into five "books," none of which is long enough or complete enough to qualify as a "book"—my only complaint about the novel. Instead, it's a tragedy in the Greek mode, with all the characters coming together at the end in a life-or-death struggle in which some beautiful things are lost forever. As Warlock's story was based approximately on the gunfight at the OK Corral, The Bad Lands retells the story of the Johnson County War, moving it from Wyoming in 1892 to the Dakotas in 1884. The "War" was a violent conflict between big cattlemen accustomed to unfenced access to a huge range, and farmers and smaller ranchers seeking their own fresh starts on shared federal lands. The novel's hero shares the early life experiences of Theodore Roosevelt, although he's unlike Roosevelt in other respects. The antihero is similarly based on the Marquis de Morès, a French aristocrat turned rancher, although again, his personality is different in many respects, and he's Scottish instead of French.

There is action enough to keep anybody interested, and it's a hell of a story. My own awareness that things would not end well—which is more or less announced in a two-page prologue from the point of view of the hero in old age—led me to a sense of dread as I neared the end, but I was overly sensitive. It's just that the tone of the book, amidst the sweat and the gunfights and the colorful figures, is similar to the bleak films of the 1970s (The Last Detail, The Conversation) just as Warlock, with its subtext of labor unrest and law versus vigilanteism, mirrored the common concerns of the 1950s. (The two books were written in those eras.) This book should and will satisfy anybody who's looking for a Western that's also great literature. ( )

Pretty impossible to ever equal the greatness of Warlock, but The Bad Lands ends on a very strong note after slowly building up for most of the story. ( )

This is the least engaging of Hall's "The Legends West Trilogy". The characters are taken from the Marquis de Moray, who spent a great deal of money trying to make a cattle ranch in South Dakota a paying proposition, and Theodore Roosevelt, who came west as a tourist, and had a good time, while polishing his frontier image for New York. The stress in this book is the arrival of the small farmers and the attempts by the big ranchers to defend themselves. There are echoes of the Johnson County War, as well. But the characters are not so human as they were in "Warlock", and the book is overall flatter, though still competent.
The original copyright is 1978. ( )