“Best Stories of the American West” Highlights Western Short Fiction

By Jenny Shank, 5-16-07

Best Stories of the American West, Volume One
Edited by Marc Jaffe
Forge, 320 pages, $25.95

Last month Forge books released Best Stories of the American West, the first volume in a projected series.  Although there are many annual short story anthologies, this one is a welcome addition because it’s the only one I know of that exclusively features stories set in the West.  The collection is so good that I’m willing to overlook the fact that its editor, Marc Jaffe, lives in Massachusetts.

Jaffe has been a dedicated Western literature enthusiast throughout his long publishing career, and he has chosen a broad range of stories from well-known authors such as Elmore Leonard and Melanie Rae Thon and writers who were new to me, such as Pete Fromm and Bruce Machart. The volume takes a catholic approach and pieces by “genre” Western writers sit comfortably alongside those by “literary” writers.  There’s even a story by He Who Shall Not Be Named.  Jaffe explained his compilation methods in the introduction:

“First, what is the West in the context of fiction?  Is it the West of John Ford and John Wayne?  Of Red River and Gunsmoke?  Of Denver suburbs and Glacier National Park?  Of Hollywood and Vine or the ranchettes of Oregon and Montana?  The simple answer, for my purpose, is geographical—namely the eleven western states as drawn on the map.
Next, need the chosen writers be Westerners by birth, or even residence?  Again, I think a simple answer is the best—‘no’ to each part of the question.  We are after subject matter here, these are stories ‘of the West.’”

Jaffe opted not to feature the best Western stories of all-time, or even those of the year, as the Best American Short Stories and New Stories From The South Collections do.  Instead, he writes, “The writers are all alive and working at the craft (at least at the time of selection).” That statement has a rather ominous tone to it—maybe these writers should all go in for physicals—but it’s appropriate as many of the stories focus on matters of life and death. 

There’s Pete Fromm’s “Snow Cave,” featuring the classic setup of man-against-nature, film director John Sayles’ wonderful “Dillinger in Hollywood,” about an elderly man in a Hollywood nursing home who claims to be John Dillinger, and John Rember’s “Sudden Death, Over Time,” about an Idaho man ruminating about his fifty-fourth birthday and the fact that “the average age of death of ex-NFL players is fifty-three, and a steroid-induced heart attack gets most of them.”

I noticed that many of these stories featured characters doing their work, and I wonder if this is a more common focus stories set in the West than elsewhere.  The work depicted is often dangerous, interesting, and intimately connected to the landscape, from cowboys driving cattle in Johnny D. Boggs’ “Red River Crossing,” to the story of a young Mexican-American cop in Elmore Leonard’s “The Hard Way” to a female bush pilot in Steven Patterson’s “Aground and Aloft.” The landscape is important in most of the stories, and often has implications for the plot (such as in “Snow Cave” and “Aground and Aloft”) or the theme or mood (as in Elmer Kelton’s “Continuity,” a fine story of a ranch run by several generations of a family).

It’s hard to pick favorites in such a diverse collection, but Bruce Machart’s “Among the Living Amidst the Trees” completely fascinated me.  Machart’s story is written in the tradition of Eudora Welty’s “Where is the Voice Coming From?” which she wrote from the imagined perspective of the racist killer of civil rights activist Medgar Evers.  Machart’s story is set in the town of Jasper, Texas, just after three white men killed a black man, James Byrd, by dragging him behind a truck.  But instead of writing from the killers’ perspective, Machart writes from the viewpoint of a regular guy who lives in the town and is not racist, but must deal with the affects of the media invasion that ensues after the killing, and the implication that all the town’s residents are murderous thugs. 

When an out-of-town reporter suggests that a group of elderly men who shaved their heads in solidarity with a friend enduring chemotherapy are in fact skinheads, the narrator’s anger boils over.  Besides having a great plot and a fully evoked setting, the writing is just beautiful.  When the cancer patient, Tricky, sees that his friends have shaved their heads, Machart writes, “It was a hard man’s brand of brotherhood, and the night they did it Tricky walked into the bar, and when he saw them his eyes filled with a liquid look of something like love.”

I loved John Sayles’ “Dillinger in Hollywood,” with its nursing home residents with “glorified notion[s] of who they used to be.” “Now we’ve had our delusions at the Home,” Sayles writes, “your standard fading would-of-been actresses expecting their call from Mr. DeMille, a Tarzan whoop now and then during the full moon, and on old gent who goes around mouthing words without sound and overacting like he’s on the silent picture screen.”

I also was struck by Pete Fromm’s “Snow Cave,” about a father and son who go out hunting and get caught in a storm that puts their lives in jeopardy.  It’s a story like many we read about in the West, tales of hikers or climbers who get into trouble in rough terrain and weather, and it shows how one careless decision can lead to a heartbreaking loss.  Melanie Rae Thon’s “Confession for Raymond Good Bird,” is a beautiful meditation on a friendship.  Elmore Leonard’s story is a swift, deft, morality tale, and I was interested to learn in his biographical sketch that he started out his career as a Western writer, penning tales for pulp magazines such as Argosy, before the “market for Westerns disappeared” and he “began to write crime novels.”

I would have liked to see more stories by women in this collection—I’m not suggesting that the split should be 50-50, but that there are so many Western women writers doing great work in the short story form right now that it seems like there should be more than two stories out of twenty by female authors.  Off the top of my head, I can think of Antonya Nelson (Colorado/Texas/Arizona/Kansas), Aryn Kyle (Colorado/Montana), Annie Proulx (Wyoming), Maile Meloy (Montana/California), and Laura Pritchett (Colorado).  Maybe some of these writers will turn up in the next edition of Best Stories of the American West, which I look forward to reading.