The best way to honor a genre is to subvert it. Let them tell Quentin Tarantino. And the western is also for that. To laugh at their codes of honor. To stretch his prison clichés and end up bursting them. To play with its veiled sexual connotations. To turn it upside down. And that’s what he’s done Johnny S. Moon (if you are regulars of this publication, you don’t have to be a lynx to find out who is behind it) in this “Bitter like peyote” (2023), one of the paperbacks in the collection tales of the west of Stephanie Projectwhich already pays tribute from its very name to the paperbacks of Marcial Lafuente Estefania (1903-1984), writer of more than two thousand western novels throughout the last century, and many other native authors camouflaged in names like Silver Kane, Lou Carrigan o Curtis Garland. Unfairly reviled for those after-dinner meals in which you had to swallow them on TV yes or yes (I’m talking about forty years ago, the childhood of the person signing, the upper Pleistocene), the western sheltered some of the most momentous aspects of any story with spirit of transcending: heroism, nobility, fidelity, partying, sex. They were the mold. up to “The Beasts” (Rodrigo Sorogoyen, 22) It is said to be a rural western, although we do not see a cowboy hat in it.
The town of Desert Hole is the imaginary location of this collection –with covers by the comic book artist Jaume Pallardó–, of which this book is already (if I am not mistaken) the tenth installment, after those written by Vicky Gatekeeper, Heme Brazo, Mr. Perfumme o Sarah Olives, among others. The author marks here a hilarious story at times, full of agile and scathing dialogues, characters whose profile is traced in a few brushstrokes and lysergic detours (peyote, of course), which is read in one breath and conveys more connotations than it his condition of light reading may at first suggest. And it is part of a beautiful and intelligent way of reactivating a genre, that of short western novels, to be rescued not as a nostalgic operation but as a pertinent update. He does have some good laughs, yes. But also successful reflections on the backdrop of a world that will not return.