Dancers in the Scalp House

by William Eastlake

Book by Eastlake, William

245 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1975

Reviews

[🐴 🍖]

there's this thing eastlake does here and in castle keep where his characters will bust out the goofiest most vaudevillian dialogue and yet you never get the sense that he or the chars in question are making light of the subject... like, without raveling the plot too much for ya, the navajo folks this is centered on are faced with what amounts to ethnic cleansing and have to decide whether or not an act of unspeakable terrorism is justified, & yet everybody goes around abbott & costello-ing it up, which somehow doesn't detract from the seriousness of the moral question at hand. if i were the paper writing sort i would whip something up comparing it to the use of slapstick in beckett but instead i'll just bask in it and impatiently await a film adaptation

[Phil Overeem · Rating 5 out of 5]

How can you resist a book about a dwindling community of Santa Fe Indians who talk as if they have been weaned on Marx Brothers movies (Hotel manager: "Do you have a reservation?" Bull Who Looks Up: "Yes, but it's about to destroyed by a flood.") Whose lives and land are threatened by the erection of a pointless white-man-dam, but who've produced one college graduate who, with the help of a Japanese plutocrat with a great memory, has developed a nuclear weapon that can be activated by a TV remote for the sole purpose of blowing up the whole ugly mess? Who are led by a sexy red-headed revolutionary who's left the Caucasian pack to find her "inner Indian"? Who are overseen by eagles that can rain destruction on helicopters? Whose members boast names like Nice Hands' Sister, Kills the Enemy, Bull Who Looks Up (as seen above, particularly adept at one-liners in tense situations), and Looks Important After a Rain? Who are dogged by a compulsively masturbating FBI agent?

This one's hard to find but worth it. I learned about it in THE CATALOG OF COOL (or maybe TOO COOL), which has yet to steer me wrong on under-the-radar books.

[zunggg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eastlake returns to the Checkerboard Indian country of northwestern New Mexico, the setting of his brilliant so-called trilogy, for a final hangout with the Navajo as White America threatens to explode, flood, develop, sell or otherwise despoil the last of their land from under them. The whiplash dialogue, equally comic and gnomic, is amped up even further now, sometimes wobbling on the verge of self-parody, and the scenes of the author-character and his wife screwing on the floor of their ranch house didn’t do a lot for me. But these are minor quibbles set against (i) the excellence of Eastlake’s satire of this society that hunts eagles with helicopters and stripmines the desert to feed redundant power plants and (ii) his empathy with the Indians, such that there’s never a question of who’s the “other” here.

[David Gandle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book...lots of insights about New Mexico traditional lifestyle.