THE DEEP ONES: "Black Boots" by Robert McCammon

"Black Boots" by Robert McCammon

Discussion begins March 15, 2023.

First published in Razored Saddles (1989).



BIBLIOGRAPHY

https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?63343

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

Razored Saddles

ONLINE VERSIONS

https://www.robertmccammon.com/fiction/black_boots.html

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

No authorized online audio versions found to date.

MISCELLANY

https://www.robertmccammon.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_R._McCammon
https://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/interview-robert-mccammon/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx-C-pI98V4
https://tinyurl.com/3vjn2x86

I've always found that McCammon's work goes down pretty easy, even for the duration of his mammoth novels from the 80s like They Thirst or Swan Song. Why someone doesn't adapt the latter for a tv series instead of making the umpteenth attempt at The Stand is beyond me. It's interesting that Joe Lansdale chose this one to lead off his Razored Saddles anthology. It reads a lot like one of Joe's tales, minus his, shall we say, colorful dialog and uniquely outre characters.

Now, Slaughter clearly is seeing things that aren't there, and towards the end one can (or at least I could) hardly fail to wonder if "Black Boots" exists at all outside his deranged mind. I imagine the final line is there precisely to undermine any excessive certainty that it's all delusion, however, suggesting there indeed was some external entity pursuing him.

I read this in two chunks, first on Monday, then today. I liked it rather better today - less, I think, because it got better along the way, than because I was in a more receptive state myself.

>3 AndreasJ:

The white-worms-in-the-canteen sequence at the beginning was pretty jarring!

I've never read anything by Robert McCammon before this one. I haven't read many westerns either, but of course all the tropes and imagery are totally familiar anyway (we read Shane in school English lessons when I was 13 or 14).

This was an enjoyable read, the modern equivalent of pulpy I suppose, but I can't find a lot to say about it. Slaughter's father's suicidal religous mania gives some back story, or at least suggests an inherited mental instabity, as well as a possible reason for the Hellish nature of Slaughter's hallucinations - McCammon sketches all this in with no apparent effort, a craftsman at work.

I took this to be completely non-supernatural, with the gravedigger's black boots an ironic touch and nothing more (I would also read Slaughter's killing by a woman - a grieving mother, at that - also as ironic, given that his whole outlaw persona is a kind of toxic masculinity).