About the Book
This Way Slaughter, an original work of literary, biographical fiction about "the Voice of the Texas Revolution" and Commander of the Alamo, William Barret Travis, marks the first and only time that figure has received full-length treatment in a novel. Typically a character portrayed as a rather minor stick figure forfeit to a much larger, unthinkably violent and bloody drama, one overshadowed by more celebrated names like Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie and Sam Houston, Slaughter places the 26-year-old attorney, schoolteacher, editor and diarist centerstage where he is subjected to relentlessly probing, yet empathic scrutiny. Here is "Buck" Travis, not as pop culture insists upon depicting him, but as a living, breathing, "walking around" human being, warts and all: Valorous to a fault, yet capable of the most bitter cynicism. Intellectually brilliant, yet a courtier of romance. A political firebrand with but a begrudging interest in politics. An unwilling warrior more interested in words than in weaponry who found himself reluctantly drafted into occupying an epic, history-making role for which he considered himself singularly ill-suited. In the end, what emerges in the course of the novel is an indelible, highly provocative portrait of a conflicted, fatalistic, yet duty-bound young man haunted by an unsavory past, pledged to an impossible present, and pursued by an inescapable future, one whose violent love affair with an even more violent Texas frontier, cost him his life. On another level, the novel is both a meditation on historical time, and the manner in which the interplay between fact and fiction determines the kinds of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, about our past, and about how we choose to bequeath those stories to the future.
About the Author :
Reared in the Upper Midwest, Bruce Olds has lived at various periods in New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami and Chicago. He is the author of three award-winning works of fiction, the Pulitzer Prize nominated The Moments Lost, Bucking the Tiger and the Pulitzer Prize Finalist, Raising Holy Hell.
Review :
"This Way Slaughter is not the literal story of the rise from the ashes of the Lone Star of the Republic of Texas. It is the literary tale of the birth of the Texas mythology with the gods Sam Houston, Stephen Austin, James Bowie, Juan Seguin, David Crockett, James Bonham, Sam Maverick above the fires of the Alamo and within the pearly gates of San Jacinto as seen through the eyes of one of those gods, William Barret Travis, commander and poet of the Alamo." --Robert Flynn, author, North to Yesterday and Wanderer Springs; past president, Texas Institute of Letters
"'Remember the Alamo!' was a rallying cry, and you will remember the Alamo after Bruce Olds's astonishing This Way Slaughter, but you'll remember it differently than ever before. With a formal opportunism to rival Jean Toomer's in Cane and a historical resonance the equal of W.G. Sebald's in Austerlitz, Olds sets his William Barret Travis to telling more than he meant to tell. The result is 'the proper purring of the page, ' a gripping story that sheds light on a past moment, and sheds even more on the present. --H.L. Hix, author, First Fire, Then Birds and American Anger
"An Olds novel not only reproduces a moment in history, it recreates the process by which that moment became history. The result is a revaluation of the code of sanctified violence that is at the heart of the Western and of American myth. A fascinating exploration of the psychology and patterns of belief of a particular kind of American hero . . . . Moving, funny and smart." --Richard Slotkin, author, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860
"Bruce Olds's novel This Way Slaughter is a de-Disney-fied anti-epic, a dazzling Menippean satire upon the myth of the Alamo as told by the garrison's fatally amateurish commander-by-default William Barrett Travis, a tactical genius of catastrophe whose main idea was to trap his men inside a glorified cattle pen and send for help. Iconoclastic, irreverent, subversive, and slyly anachronistic, This Way Slaughter detonates with wit and poetry under received wisdom and the glittering past." --Douglas Glover, author, The Life and Times of Captain N and Elle
