Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsA poor cousin to Blood Meridian
Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2009
Given this book's subject matter, it would be very hard to avoid comparisons with Cormac McCarthy's magisterial Blood Meridian. I suppose it's not fair: BM is one of the finest novels of the 20th century. But, as in Peter Carey's A True History of the Kelly Gang, it's a comparison it seems Woodrell sought. Be a hell of a coincidence if he didn't.
The first things you notice in Ride With the Devil are the stylistic similarities, the attempt to pull off a rustic-cum-Biblical dialect. In places it works, in others it doesn't. (Did they use the word "okay" in the 1860s?) That's the problem: you don't fully buy in because you're always aware of the intent, never quite sink yourself fully into the story because of how it's being told. If the book were a constant dazzle of verbal pyrotechnics that'd be one thing, but Woodrell just doesn't quite have the stuff. So you're left with a story that never quite lifts off in a voice that never quite stops being stilted. BM is a masterwork because it accomplishes both, and seemingly effortlessly. Ride With the Devil works hard to get there, but doesn't quite make it.
Also you notice the plethora of short paragraphs.
I generally don't think too much of short, one-sentence paragraphs, because in drawing so much attention to themselves they usually unnecessarily accentuate the melodramatic.
Having said that, Ride With The Devil keeps the pages turning. Woodrell provides no cheap psychological answers to the riddles of his characters' barbarous behavior. Not just because these things actually happened, but because the characters themselves are incapable of such understanding. Also, I appreciated the dearth of show-off details. No recipes for hogs-eye soup or loving descriptions of Navy revolvers. You believe Woodrell got these details right without being bludgeoned by needless trivia, as is often the case in novels of a historical bent. What details are included serve the story and not the other way round - a case of fiction writing history rather than the reverse. Woodrell has not fallen for that old trap. The brutal happenings are served up without relish but without flinching. You come away from the book with a sense of a time and place you are glad not to have lived through yourself.
On its own merits, Ride With The Devil would get a B+. Unfortunately, BM casts a long long shadow. In this case of familial resemblance, Woodrell comes off the poor, distant relation.