Skip to content

Month: September 2017

Book Review: Line in the Valley

I originally wrote this for Breach-Bang-Clear a while back, but it seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle, so here it is.

Line in the Valley is hard to categorize.  It’s a crime novel, a war novel, and a psychological study of men under the highest possible stress in combat, all at the same time.  It’s set against a backdrop of an invasion of South Texas, but that really only sets the background against which the events take place.

The story starts off with a bang, as advance elements made up of local gang-bangers eliminate all the cops in the target border towns.  It then follows the initial response, which goes very badly, before we get into the nitty gritty of the counterattack, which is where the meat of the story happens.

Telling Spook Stories Around the Campfire

I got my start as a storyteller in the dark, around campfires, up at Camp Fife in Washington State, about eighteen years ago, now.  In a real way, the Jed Horn series is simply a continuation of that old tradition.

There are two kinds of campfire story; the traditional ones that are passed down from fire to fire, for years, only changing in small details of the telling, flexible things that are simply the flavor the teller adds as he goes.  The other kind are the ones I mostly told; the improvised scary stories.

My first was pretty simple.  A wisp in the woods, a curious Scout, and a game of cat-and-mouse underground with a monster that could change shape at will.  It wasn’t the best spook story ever told, but I had already learned a few things from it.  Between that one and a couple of the later ones, I developed a few rules.