“In a cold dawn, in a cold house, Bond Rogers sat, watching through her own tears her son grieve the loss, in less than two years, of two fathers”

I came to read Glendon Swarthout’s 1975 western classic ‘The Shootist’ after it was recommend by TikTok user Jeninsight. In her video she described Swarthout’s novel as Red Dead Redemption II’s biggest influence. Having had fallen in love with RDR2, wow, almost 4 years ago, i just had to get my hands on ‘The Shootist’.

John Bernard Books is The Shootist, not the assassin, and not the killer. Books only shoots if he’s threatened. But he’s not the only shootist in the world—this one comes in the form of Prostate Cancer. And this is a shootist that Books can’t kill even with his Remingtons. Or can he?

This book really does make you feel like you’re in an Wild West movie. The gunfights in the saloons, the carriages, the horse rides. And I appreciated the relationship with Books and the Rodgers’ family (Mother Bond and Son Gillom).

To read a book about a man essentially dying from page 1 to 213, and to see him try so hard to die of his own accord, the only way he knows how, was insane.