Grave Men

Priest & Lamarr #1

by Tom Piccirilli

While Molly tries to find the man who murdered their parents five years earlier, Priest McClaren tries to run a little store with his partner, Lamarr, an ex-slave and ex-Union soldier, but when a wealthy landowner begins harassing them and Molly is forced to give up on the hunt, Priest must take over and make these dangerous men pay for their sins. Original.

Genres: Westerns, Fiction, Horror

265 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2002

About the author

Thomas Piccirilli (May 27, 1965 – July 11, 2015) was an American novelist and short story writer.

Piccirilli sold over 150 stories in the mystery, thriller, horror, erotica, and science fiction fields. He was a two-time winner of the International Thriller Writers Award for "Best Paperback Original" (2008, 2010). He was a four-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award. He was also a finalist for the 2009 Edgar Allan Poe Award given by the Mystery Writers of America, a final nominee for the Fantasy Award, and the winner of the first Bram Stoker Award given in the category of "Best Poetry Collection".

Reviews

[Ben Boulden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tom Piccirilli's GRAVE MEN is outside the ordinary of the Western genre. Piccirilli uses an evocative voice -- haunting, ethereal -- that is more common to the horror genre than the western. The plotting is less linear with powerful backflashes. The characterization is strong, especially for the key characters: Priest, Lamarr, and Gramps. It is anything but formulaic, and it will likely appeal more to horror readers than western readers. But I enjoyed it a bunch and couldn't help to compare it to the westerns of H. A. De Rosso.

[Jeff Tankersley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Priest McClaren is our protagonist in "Grave Men" (2002), a young man who has settled into a mediocre, lazy life by haunted memories of his parents being murdered by outlaws five years prior. His sister Molly took the usual male mantle of vengeance seeker, now working as a trigger-happy bounty hunter across the West, while he has settled into a drunken friendship with a black troublemaker named Lamarr, opening a trading goods store that Apaches torch in the book's opening pages.

The vengeance plot is more of a side story in "Grave Men" as we see Priest with his internal haunting and reckoning with violence and loves past, currently conflicted in his feelings towards the local beauty Sarah, who is being pursued by a local big shot named Septemus, who also happens to be Lamarr's illegitimate father.

While Priest's internal conflicts and Lamarr's fist-fighting ones take up much of the book's early pages, the lingering specter of Yuma Dean, the cowardly bank robber who killed Priest's parents, is always there, casting shadows and menace over everything Priest does and everyone who tries to befriend him.

Verdict: An interesting but odd-toned legacy western, with sins of the past leaving broken people in Priest's orbit, kind of a morality play combined with internal judgement tale. The internal monologuing and relations of feelings repeat enough that it is a boring read at times, and the tropier racist, anti-Indian, hookers, and abuse of women backstories are frequent and dismissed offhand in a careless fashion. A well-earned conclusion wraps things up nicely but it isn't a good read getting there.

Jeff's Rating: 2 / 5 (Okay)
movie rating if made into a movie: R

[Chris Stephens · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whatever genre Piccirilli wrote he did it well. This, a heavy plot that felt lighthearted for the subject matter, also felt a lot like a Hap and Lenard story of Landsdale's.
Well worth reading even if you are not a fan of westerns.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

An offbeat Western that's a bit too offbeat for its own good. Priest, an aimless twenty-something who wanders around feeling sorry for himself all the time, makes for a very unappealing hero, and his sidekick, Lamarr, is a lot of fun but way too flamboyant and over-the-top to be believable. GRAVE MEN is a tale of revenge, yes, but it's a lazy sort of revenge--the kind where your enemy is handed up on a silver platter.
However, while there was much in this book that didn't work for me, there was much I found delightful. Character-wise, author Tom Piccirilli avoids all the typical Western cliches (though the plot is standard Spaghetti Western fare), and he's more of a writer's writer than guys like Louis L'Amour or Max Brand (Piccirilli is a Bram Stoker Award-winning poet, after all). I only wish the whole book had been about Priest's bounty-hunting sister.
Here's hoping Book #2 is a more satisfying read.

[L J Field · Rating 2 out of 5]

Had potential...

I was really pulling for this novel to be a great book as I reached the end of the fourth chapter. But I'd already reached the high point. The story was well written, but the absurdities kept piling up and the novel lost its way. The tired formula of a couple of friends, one white, the other black, taking on the world in search of justice, just didn't come off too well considering the time that the book took place -- right after the civil war. Lamaar, a friendly giant of imposing strength and murderous skill and his friend, a recovering alcoholic with no discernible skills, taking on a batch of hired killers and coming out on top was just so over-the-top that I never, even for a little while, believed it could possibly resemble reality.

[Brett]

Horror

[Jilles · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am not a big western fan. It seems to be about men waiting for the right time to shoot each other. But Piccirilli is a very good writer, which makes reading this book at least interesting for me.