[In the excerpt below, the critic comments briefly on Never Die.]

After the uncharacteristic mildness of his last book, Boomerang, this Mississippi author has returned to form—and gone West—in a stylish and absurdist chronicle of revenge, misery, and mayhem. [Never Die] is set in a corrupt little South Texas frontier town, circa 1910, and it concerns the crippling of a caballero named Fernando Muré and his vow to burn down the iniquitous town. (A sub-theme is the promise of escape offered by newly invented forms of transportation: automobiles, motorcycles, and airplanes.) The other characters, almost all of them wicked, have names like Nitburg, Smoot, Fingo, and Nix, and as they wreak and suffer various forms of Jacobean havoc their crazed and swerving thoughts and dreams are conveyed in sentences that are lithe, surprising, and hilariously laconic. The spirit of Sam Peckinpah lurks in the elegiac violence and fatalism of this fabulist Western, but the silver-tongued prose is all Hannah.