April 10, 2008

Drop Edge of Yonder

Screenwriter and novelist Rudy Wurlitzer, who cut a legendary swathe across Hollywood in the '70s and '80s with outsider classics like Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop, Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Alex Cox's Walker, has written an exciting acid western epic.

The Drop Edge of Yonder (an archaic Texas phrase meaning “on the brink of death”) is a mystic western possessed of anarchic charms and incantatory beauty. It begins in the mountains of Colorado and ends in the far reaches of the Northwest, a journey that includes the beginnings of a Mexican revolution, a voyage across the Gulf of Mexico to Panama, and up the coast of California to San Francisco and the gold fields.

Mountain-man, trapper and opportunistic beast Zebulon Shook starts the tale by getting cursed from a mysterious Native American woman whose lover he inadvertently murdered. Doomed never to know whether he is in the spirit world, the real world or just dreaming, he departs from his homestead along the Gila River in New Mexico to sell pelts. After meeting up with his adopted brother, Hatchet Jack, and losing at cards to Delilah, a beautiful Abyssinian courtesan, Zebulon is shot during a barroom dustup and sets out for California, where the gold rush is gathering steam, bringing with it the law and order that threatens the “mountain doin's” that he loves so dearly. Zebulon is pulled ever deeper into the era's bizarre historical footnotes: immortalized as a notorious outlaw by a reporter; narrowly missing joining the Walker expedition to colonize Nicaragua; reconnecting with Delilah at a San Francisco opium den; and finding the law and order forces dogging his heels to the last. This furiously told legend weaves history and myth into a riotous tale.

In Drop Edge of Yonder, Zebulon confronts the age-old questions of life love, and death, before disappearing into a shadowy realm of myth and legend.

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