The Southern Liver Regulators by RL Martin

The giant pine in the front yard cowered at its own stature, doubting as the clouds grew thicker whether growing so tall had been wise.

This was a little novelette and short story collection I picked up on Smashwords. You can find it there here.

First of all I want to recognize RL Martin’s courage in putting their stories out there. Thanks, person who writes westerns, for continuing to do so! You’re doing more than me at the moment, and I salute you for the effort!

Also, I want to say, compared to other self-published western stories off Smashwords that I’ve been (trying to) read recently, this collection is pretty decent.

However, the collection of stories it’s more okay than exciting, and I found the stories were a bit sloppily told. There were numerous typos. One story is set in Taiwan, which I really was not expecting. (It was weird, but somewhat amusing, as a story.)

There were a couple of endings to the stories in this collection that I just couldn’t follow or “get.” I guess I’m just not on the same wavelength as the author. Sometimes pacing was a bit of a problem. However, with a few of the other stories, I felt that there was a decent heart to them, they just needed a bit more editing to shine.

One of the short stories in this collection won a prize in a contest put on by the Quincy (Illinois) Writer’s Guild in 1998.

The novelette, which gives it’s name to the collection, about a saloon owner, vigilantes, racism, and the practice of shanghaiing, started to head in a direction that I felt could have been quite interesting, and which perked my interest part way through, but unfortunately turned around and contradicted it’s heading by the end. That was something of a disappointment to me, as you can likely tell.

Overall, this book suceeded in holding my attention better than some of it’s Smashword “colleagues” and provided some light entertainment for a few hours, but it’s not anything I’m likely to return to.

I give this collection two patent medicine bottles out of five.

My next western review will likely be of The Searchers, the last title in my big hardcopy collection of classic popular western novels.