The Adventures of Gunny the Kid by Mike Brown

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Mike Brown’s The Adventures of Gunny the Kid is a new kind of western, it has all the usual elements, a gunfighter coming into town and discovers the town has been taken over by a corrupt sheriff and banker and vows to free the townspeople and right the wrongs of the corrupt. But Brown shows the west in a hallucinogenic glow, the desert isn’t a place of sand and death but a living thing full of life in the flora and fauna that is found, and even in the townspeople who while you recognize their occupations and places in western lore their point of view is certainly different, and more complicated, like real human beings and not archetypes.

The hallucinogenic is obvious in that the main character wears a serape made of guns and is consistently ingesting peyote, whiskey, laudanum and various mixtures created by his friend, Bart the Bookworm. But it’s more than that, the way Brown approaches the plot, structure and even the formatting of the novel.

While the plot is familiar to anyone who has watched a western or read western, either old or new, black and white (in most westerns the viewpoint is black or white) or color, Brown turns it sideways in the way Gunny approaches the situation through visions and philosophy. That is not to say there isn’t a lot of gunplay and violence, but that’s an intrinsic part of the American story. Just as The Matrix feeds their audience a lot of philosophy it is hardly noticed because the audience is all caught up in the kung-fu and gunplay scenes, Brown does the same thing in The Adventures of Gunny the Kid.

The structure of The Adventures of Gunny the Kid is unorthodox, it’s like Brown cut out some of the dross of novels, and just leaves the pearls of the plot. The paragraphs and more like stanzas in a poem or it reminds me of Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues where the poems are divided into choruses, I don’t know if Brown has been influenced by Kerouac or any of the other beats (William Burroughs?), but it seems kind of like something they might write if they wrote a western.

I also found myself mesmerized by some of the passages especially when he delves into the mystic there is some very good writing like in Gunny the Kid such as when Gunny comes back into town from a visionquest and “still had some dreams dripping off of him” and describing a thunderstorm as “giant vaporous brains full of bad dreams.”

As I mentioned you’ll find some philosophy in between the violence and bank robbery and shoot outs, and you may or may not agree with it but it’s important that the ideas get out there and at the very least thought about. I’m convinced some of the best philosophers of our age aren’t in academia but are writers for the most part living incognito trying to get the word out. Mike Brown has ideas and a point of view. The Adventures of Gunny the Kid will open your mind with ideas.



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