Running Horsemen
Dolph LeMoult
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2004 Brown Barn Books
ISBN: 0974648108

Leaving Texas a 15 year-old boy comes of age while searching for his father in New York City.

In 1952 Chance wants to escape his life & the preacher, wooing his mother, who incessantly quotes the Scriptures at them. His father was sent to Europe to fight during WWII & never came home. His mother is neither a wife nor a widow. Then, one evening at dinner when the Reverend is berating his mother & him with his brand of hell & brimstone, the phone rings. It is his father calling from New York. Thus endeth the Reverend's interest, not without the obligatory invectives & prophecies, mind you.

“I always felt that he considered his attentions to her [his mother] to be a favor, and that he expected her to feel that way too. She was after all, soiled merchandise, and he was a man of the gospel; worthy of the freshest flower in God's earthly kingdom”. (Page 3)

Now Chance is determined to make some money so his mother & he can go find his father, except in Eula, there's no way to make enough for the trip. After earning a summer's worth of wages at the Feed & Grain store owned by the father of his best friend, who happens to be one of the ugliest & most crippled boys around, he walks into Eula's sole den of iniquity, the Moon nightclub, intent on putting it all down on a game of poker.

The only game he's allowed to join is with the shady owner. At that table Chance learns his first lessons in dealing with the real, grown-up world. Nevertheless, at the close, Chance walks away with a bundle -- the proceeds of his father's involvement in a heist many years before.

But now his mother had decided to marry the Reverend, & put Chance's father out of her life forever. Even she begins to quote Scriptures at him. He's ready to split. So off he sets on his own: a young, angry, country boy galloping into the Big Bad World, where he meets up with a cast of characters ranging from the harmlessly strange to the dangerously normal. In the drama of his everyday life, he makes a huge discovery, & encounters the pangs of first love.

Told in a rollicking, idiomatic, profound & profane & often hilarious voice, Running Horsemen will move you with its fascinating take on life, liberty & the pursuit of freedom, fathers & manhood.

This is every youth's coming of age tale: the turns of phrases, the scenes described & the adventures are exceptionally told & will linger long after the last page is read.

Outstanding!
(08/28/05)

Rebecca