{"id":793,"date":"2018-12-31T14:01:16","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T14:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=793"},"modified":"2018-12-31T14:01:16","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T14:01:16","slug":"lone-star-book-reviews-25","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/?p=793","title":{"rendered":"Lone Star Book Reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Lone Star Book Reviews
of Texas books appear weekly
at LoneStarLiterary.com<\/a><\/span><\/h1>\n
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BILL WITTLIFF<\/span> is a distinguished screenwriter and producer whose credits include Lonesome Dove, The Perfect Storm, The Black Stallion,<\/span> and Legends of the Fall, <\/span>among others. His fine art photography has been published in the books A Book of Photographs from Lonesome Dove,<\/span> La Vida Brinca,<\/span> and Vaquero: Genesis of the Texas Cowboy.<\/span><\/p>\n

JOE CIARDIELLO<\/span> illustrated Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing,<\/span> and his portraits of authors have appeared in the New York Times Book Review.<\/span> Among his awards are four silver medals from the Society of Illustrators.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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<\/a><\/span>HISTORICAL FICTION<\/p>\n

Bill Wittliff, illustrated by Joe Ciardiello<\/p>\n

The Devil\u2019s Sinkhole<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

University of Texas Press<\/p>\n

Hardcover, 978-1477309742, 214 pgs., $29.95 (also available as an e-book)<\/p>\n

October 4, 2016<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Fran\u00e7ois Pointeau<\/p>\n

The Devil\u2019s Sinkhole is a real place in Texas,<\/span> a National Natural Landmark that houses one of the state\u2019s largest colonies of Mexican free-tailed bats. You can visit if you call the Devil\u2019s Sinkhole Society to make reservations. It\u2019s also a very important part of Bill Wittliff\u2019s<\/span> novel by the same name. I can\u2019t tell you why. You\u2019ll have to read the novel for that. However, like the first novel in the series, The Devil\u2019s Backbone,<\/span> the story revolves around real landmarks in and around the Texas Hill Country. In a way, it is an imagined travel memoir of life in Central Texas in the late 1800s, and it\u2019s breathtaking.<\/p>\n

The Devil\u2019s Sinkhole<\/span> is not an easy read. The writing is highly stylized. That said, it is worth your time and effort. Let me repeat: It is worth your time and effort.<\/p>\n

What Bill Wittliff does with his writing is paint a picture of the world in which his characters live, to the level that I found myself thinking and talking like them. It\u2019s like that moment when you finally think in a foreign language and the light comes on because it\u2019s no longer foreign. The Devil\u2019s Sinkhole<\/span> buries itself into your unconsciousness and doesn\u2019t let go. It\u2019s beyond just a nostalgic painting of the Texas post\u2013Civil War landscape, it is an honest portrayal of the absolute brutality of that era. You become one of Wittliff\u2019s characters on the search for vengeance and redemption, where survival is just another word for everyday living.<\/p>\n

Kill or be killed\u2014that\u2019s one aspect of this story\u2014though that\u2019s not all. This story is multifaceted. Think Mark Twain and Cervantes with a little Diderot thrown in for good measure. They become one, move to Central Texas in the 1800s, work on a pig farm, witness their evil father\u2019s decapitation after surviving their father\u2019s murder of his mother and his mother\u2019s favorite horse, then embark on the adventure of a lifetime. Two figures on horseback\u2014at this point more Cervantes and Diderot than Twain\u2014who banter about life and its meanings, dodging bullets, bandits, and all kinds of mayhem.<\/p>\n

The Devil\u2019s Sinkhole<\/span> is a quixotic tale with Twainish sensibilities told with a Texas twang. It reads like a movie, creating vivid pictures in your mind. It\u2019s a buddy story, an action picture, an adventure romance, and a revenge Spaghetti Western. It\u2019s funny, unnerving, irritating, grandiose, and heartbreaking. You are riding a horse through the mesquite and prickly pears of Central Texas while chewing on a stick, having irreverent philosophical discourse on the state of humanity, and trying to stay alive.<\/p>\n

I met Bill Wittliff a couple of years ago, when I interviewed him about the first novel in this series. Not that it should make a difference to how you should enjoy this book or not\u2014but I think you should know that he is a wonderful, charming man. He\u2019s like everybody\u2019s grandfather, and when he\u2019s in your presence, you just want to listen to all his stories. This is how I imagine he wrote this book. It\u2019s your grandfather telling you the stories of his grandfather\u2014that\u2019s my interpretation\u2014and he\u2019s too old to worry about being PC, and his Dad Jokes have become Grandfather Jokes, and, boy, don\u2019t you wish you\u2019ll be that cool and awesome if you\u2019re lucky enough to live as long.<\/p>\n

Thank you, Mr. Wittliff, for another great story.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lone Star Book Reviews of Texas books appear weekly at LoneStarLiterary.com BILL WITTLIFF is a distinguished screenwriter and producer whose credits include Lonesome Dove, The Perfect Storm, The Black Stallion, and Legends of the Fall, among others. His fine art photography has been published in the books A Book of Photographs from Lonesome Dove, La […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/793\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.etypegoogle10.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}