BookLife

An anthology is different than a single author collection of stories in the same way that a dinner party is different than dinner for two.  An anthology need not be a raucous affair, with tail-coats and lamp-shades, or broken glass and loud music.  It need not be a New Year’s blow-out or a July Fourth picnic with fire-works.  But, at the very least, it ought to be fun.

Express Westerns’ A Fistful of Legends edited by Nik Morton and Charles T. Whipple does get pretty rowdy.  This anthology of “21 New Tales of the Old West” is very much a celebration of the short form Western.  Not only is it filled with great stories well told, it’s is also filled with… exuberance.
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Why do I like Westerns so much?  Why do Western stories—the characters, the settings, the situations, the writing styles, the tropes—resonate so profoundly with me?  Anthologies like Express Westerns’ A Fistful of Legends edited by Nik Morton and Charles T. Whipple always get me thinking about the power of Western fiction.  Legends came out in 2009 and contains 21 original Western stories.

In his introduction to the anthology, novelist (and legend) James Reasoner speaks lovingly of the Western’s “tremendous power to entertain” and its “universality”:

You can tell any sort of story as a Western: comedy, tragedy, action, romance. You can pit man against nature, man against his fellow man, man against himself – or woman against herself, since strong female characters have been a tradition in Westerns going back decades…

In many ways, the Western genre remains as boundless and new as the Western frontier once was.  Just west of that ridge, as it were, anything is possible.  And as a result, the genre, like the characters and settings at its core, is larger than life.
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“Above all else, Howard Hopkins can make a story rocket forward, make you shiver and look over your shoulder, make you chuckle–frequently on the same page,” said Matthew P. Mayo, author of such Westerns as Hot Lead, Cold Heart and non-fiction as Cowboys, Mountain Me, & Grizzly Bears: Fifty of the Grittiest Moments in the History of the Wild West.  “I read Howard Hopkins’ work for enjoyment–and as a bonus, I get to learn from someone who really knows how to tell a compelling story. I’ve also been fortunate to have him as my editor on a few projects, and I’ve learned that he applies that same detailed attention to other people’s work. 
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