Western / Weird Western
Permit Required for Closure
Combining Charles Portis + Carmen Maria Machado | The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger + The Power of the Dog
Synopsis
Rooster Sillman follows a man in a black coat across the alkali flats into Perdition, a town where the well answers questions, the preacher's shadow arrives early, and civic life has absorbed the impossible. His account of the pursuit is also, without his knowing it, the record of his absorption.
Portis's deadpan colloquial narrator reports Machado's body-horror transformations with straight-faced civic precision, pursuing a man across a wasteland into a town where the uncanny operates as municipal infrastructure.
Behind the Story
A discussion between Charles Portis and Carmen Maria Machado
Portis was drinking coffee from a thermos he'd brought himself. The diner had coffee — I could see the pot right there behind the counter, the orange-handled kind that means decaf, which this wasn't, but he didn't trust it. He'd driven down from Little Rock with the thermos wedged between his knees the whole way, or so he claimed. He was wearing a canvas jacket despite the heat and had the look of a man who had already decided how long he was willing to stay. "I don't care for meetings," he…
Read the full discussionThe Formula
- First-person deadpan narrator weirder than he realizes — reports the uncanny in the same register as horse prices and weather
- Colloquial voice sustained across 8,000+ words without breaking character, comic through understatement
- Narrator's calm precision as the gap where horror lives — the reader alarmed by what the narrator finds unremarkable
- The body as site of transformation — the narrator's physical dissolution (lost molars, changed skin, altered gait) documented without alarm
- Surreal fairy-tale logic embedded in civic structures — the well, the preacher's shadow, the woman who has always been there
- Queer disruption of genre expectations — the Western pursuit narrative that refuses its own destination
- Gunslinger pursuing man in black across wasteland — Rooster following the black-coated man at a distance he considers appropriate
- Western as post-apocalyptic landscape — Perdition as a town between worlds, genre as ruin
- The unreachable destination that justifies every cruelty and cost of the pursuit
- Border as place where reality becomes negotiable — crossing into Perdition as crossing into a jurisdiction where different rules apply
- Loyalty and betrayal cycling — the narrator's shifting relationship with the man he follows
- Drug-war structure of escalating commitment — each mile deeper makes retreat less possible, costs accumulate in the body
Reader Reviews
Read this after a twelve-hour shift and it crawled right under my skin. The alkali flats feel real — white and flat and no shade for thirty miles. Rooster's voice has that dry, particular way of noticing things that reminded me of old men I grew up around, the kind who'd describe a disaster the same way they'd describe lunch. The corn mush with lard and sorghum, the walnut-ink-stained hands, the dog sleeping in the road with its smooth-furred stump — all of it sits in your nose and on your tongue. The horror of it is quiet. No monsters, just paperwork that won't stop and a body that changes while you're busy trying to find the assessor's office. That line about a change becoming a condition got me. Sometimes that's how the bad thing happens. Not all at once but slow, until you can't remember the before-state.
71 found this helpful
A weird western that actually earns the label. Most stories in this subgenre just bolt a ghost onto a cattle drive, but this one builds something genuinely strange — a town where the supernatural operates through municipal procedure. The voice is the real achievement: Rooster Sillman narrating his own transformation with the calm of a man filling out a ledger. I loved the three-legged dog that was 'honest about its situation' and the preacher's shadow arriving ahead of the light. Where I'd push back slightly is the middle section where the bureaucratic logic repeats. The point lands early — filings breed obligations breed filings — and the story circles it a few more times than necessary. But the final three paragraphs are devastating. A man describing his captivity as reasonable because he's internalized the system's language. That's horror dressed in a county clerk's handwriting.
70 found this helpful
The voice is real good. Whoever wrote this knows what a burned initial in a sweatband looks like and that jerky is food but not a meal. The horse details are right — Durable is named the way a working man names a horse, and the roan's nicked shoe printing in alkali is the kind of thing you notice when you've actually tracked an animal. Where it lost me is the teeth falling out and the fingers growing and all that. I can go along with a weird town that doesn't let you leave. Fine. But the body stuff piled up past where I could stay in the saddle with it. Still, the narrator's voice carried me further than the story probably deserved, and the line about a dead place being honest about its conditions — that's true enough to frame.
65 found this helpful
This is extraordinary work — a sustained first-person voice that never breaks character across 6,000 words while describing the narrator's own absorption into a bureaucratic otherworld. The deadpan register is the engine of the horror: Rooster reports his teeth falling out with the same measured tone he uses for horse prices, and that gap between content and delivery is where all the dread lives. The passage where reading the charter generates new provisions, which generate obligations, which file against him, is a perfect recursive nightmare rendered in county governance language. And the ending, where the narrator describes his own captivity as reasonable — 'Everything here is reasonable. That is the worst part, though I would not call it the worst part' — is one of the most unsettling final paragraphs I've read this year.
62 found this helpful
Took forever to get anywhere and then when it got there it just stayed there. The first few pages move fine — man gets robbed, goes after the thief, crosses the flats. Good. Then he reaches Perdition and it's just him talking to a well and trying to find an assessor's office for what felt like fifty pages. The bureaucracy stuff is clever for about two paragraphs and then it's the same joke over and over. Filing generates obligation generates residency generates filing. I get it. Didn't need it repeated ten times.
52 found this helpful
A remarkably disciplined piece. The narrator's voice is sustained without a false note — colloquial, precise, and funnier than it knows, which is the source of both comedy and horror. The craft decision I most admire is the body transformation happening in parallel with the bureaucratic entrapment: as teeth fall out and fingers lengthen, property rights dissolve into municipal filings. Body and document are being rewritten simultaneously, and the narrator treats both with the same deadpan acceptance. The well functioning as both information desk and entrapment instrument is a lovely structural choice — every question generates a filing, every filing an obligation. One reservation: Crashaw's transformation into an 'easement' is stated rather than dramatized. Still, the closing paragraphs achieve something difficult — a narrator who has lost everything, including the capacity to recognize the loss.
48 found this helpful
Man chases a thief into a weird town and then nothing happens for thirty pages. He talks to a well. His teeth fall out. He eats corn mush. The end. I kept waiting for Rooster to actually do something — shoot somebody, escape, fight back — but he just wanders around filing complaints with a hole in the ground. The writing's fine, I guess, but a western where the hero's big conflict is with municipal paperwork is not my idea of a story.
37 found this helpful