A Man Without Honor — STEVEN HARDESTY

Have to admit I wasn’t sure I ought to publish my latest Western novel – Dead Hand – the story of a dishonorable man learning honor. Thought, instead, I ought to drop the manuscript into a bottomless drawer and forget about it. Because the story is just too damn brutal.

Why is it that way?

Dead Hand tells the story of one narrow slice of life in the Old West, the slice filled with gunfighters, thieves, traitors and villains. All of them preying on the pioneers and Native Americans, all of them seeking to poison the dream of the West. The dream we all still share.

Too much of Western fiction makes heroes of gunfighters, a breed that doesn’t deserve the title. A professional gunfighter is not a hero. A rancher is a hero, a schoolteacher is a hero, an honest sheriff is a hero.

I chose to write a novel to show gunfighters as they were in the harsh years after the Civil War, a war that helped shape them into what they were – anything but heroes. And to tell the story of one gunfighter slowly drawn away from savagery toward a decent life. Toward something more heroic.

And there you have the explanation for such a harsh novel: The core of Dead Hand, as the core of most of my other Westerns, thrillers, sci-fi and fantasy, is war. The terrible changes war can make in even ordinary, decent human beings. And the importance of each person’s resistance to those effects.

That’s why I decided to publish Dead Hand rather than dump it. Because it tells the story of a human being who, despite war’s poisoning of his soul, pushes through to become an honorable man of the West. To become something like a hero. We live in a world with too few heroes, but this man makes one more.