"I'll live yet to see him
Regret the dark hour
When he won, then neglected,
The frail wildwood flower"
- "Wildwood Flower," American folk song written by Maud Irving, best known as performed by Mother Maybelle Carter.
[Epigraph from La Belle Fleur Sauvage]
The fifth Strange Trails story is one of George Ranger Jonhson's most plain-cut romance novels. As he mentioned after the publication of Lullaby, he’d been wanting to write more “of tender things.”The story this time around comes to the patrons of George's Place from Remy Fusil, the Cajun Cowboy - a character who appears fairly little in the whole rest of GRJ's oeuvre, unless you believe certain theories of second identities (you'd be hard-pressed to find a character who doesn't have those!)
In retrospect, despite his seat in the hallowed pantheon of Strange Trails narrators, alongside such heavy-hitters as Frankie Lou and Buck Vernon, Fusil was a means to an end - that end being the introduction of Lee Green, who would play a major role in the whole rest of Johnson's works, develop from the sweet young flower of the Michigan woods she's portrayed as here, to, in the end of ends, that half-real eye-of-the-hurricane phantom haunting moonlit Mt. Monroe.
But we're getting two series ahead of ourselves. For now, in this book, GRJ deftly weaves together Remy and Lee's hesitant and, perhaps, a touch unreliably narrated romance, with the timeless legend of an unobtainable alpine flower - a legend that Remy swears is Cajun, but in other books we're told it might be Basque, or American folk. In other words, it's a story that comes from everywhere, and everyone. Maybe that's why this old tale's themes of obsessive pursuit ring through almost every page that GRJ ever set his pen to. Behind the kisses in the moonlight, there are always mountains unclimbable, withering flowers picked for ephemeral beauty once held, fools for love lying in the drifting snow, in the wind, lost in time and space, who'd give it all to pluck that fleur.
Oh yes, and we end with another cliffhanger. As Remy leans back in George's Place, having finished his tale of romance, he lights up a cigarette and a Bob Dylan tune comes on the jukebox. No one, he says, could ever challenge that his love was the purest. And then, to a galloping 4/4 beat, he hears footsteps approaching.
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The next day was hanging day, the sky was overcast and black
Big Jim lay covered up, killed by a penknife in the back
And Rosemary on the gallows, she didn't even blink
The hanging judge was sober, he hadn't had a drink
The only person on the scene missing was the Jack of Hearts
— Bob Dylan, "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts"
Seems like the cover artist was a bit nostalgic for the Lonesome Dreams era with that art, eh? In fairness, so was GRJ; those of us who look into such things have noted that Fool For Love is probably the biggest throwback of the Strange Trails novels, and the most "western" of this more modern (well, at the very least, firmly twentieth-century-set, if a couple decades back) series. Not too surprising, then, that we get the most extravagant depiction of George's Place as a "western" bar, and Either Buck Vernon or Remy Fusil (more likely, given the etymology of his name) with a pistol that doesn't actually figure into the story.
Ironically, this is one of the few Strange Trails stories that isn't a throwback in some sense, in that it's not a story in flashback. No, this one takes place on the very night that all the previous novels have been told as stories, and it marks the point where the night really goes off the rails.
... Or maybe it doesn't, because maybe it's not connected to the canon at all. Right at the beginning of this one, Buck Vernon, our narrator once more, admits to the reader that "sometimes, I see things that others say they cain't. I don't think that makes 'em unreal, but may well be I'm watching like through the window in the dark at the bottom of a broken bottle, seeing my other lives." That's as close to a fourth wall break as you'll get directly from GRJ in any story, here disguised as a fifth or sixth wall break, shattering layers of reality beyond the simple biniverse of story-truth that we all pass through without thinking on when we pick up a musty paperback. This before he tells a whole story using names that weren't in the bar up until then, and a lover named Lily who sounds almost, but not quite, like lovely Lee, whose story was just told. Li-Lee? Objectively, before we really get going, we do know that Buck came out to spin some tunes for the crowd at George's, that the set's done now and he's sitting back having a few too many while Dylan plays on the jukebox - that very tune in the epigraph is the one described, and it's notable that in the story Buck narrates in real-time, names of characters come into play.
The WBUB special based on this book didn't help with the character confusion either. Don't judge the book by the adaptation, obviously. That's always the rule.
A young fool (Buck himself, thinking he'll play the victorious Jack of Hearts in Dylan's tale?) psyches himself up and picks a fight with Big Jim (Remy Fusil?), lover of Lily. The World Enders, who are still hanging around, and the Tumbleweeds, who we're just meeting now but may be the descendants of Sri Tumbleweed's thugs from Time To Run, get caught up in things. The brawl spreads, chapter by chapter, to bring everyone in, even crashing into the Cambodian opium den behind George's which we only heard referenced in Love Like Ghosts. But things don't go well for our hopeless romantic Buck of Hearts. After a seeming escape from the chaos, Buck finds himself in a back alley where, well, spoilers, but there's a reason that the rest of the Strange Trails stories, especially Buck's, run evermore fantastically through that deep dark wooded valley between the ridges of death and life.
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The final book of George Ranger Johnson's loose Johnnie Redmayne trilogy, an arc within the broader Strange Trails series, was also its least fantastical. Hurricane was sometimes called GRJ's first attempt at young adult fiction. Of course, acolytes know that Johnson rarely set pen to paper with a specific genre in mind - the appeal of his novels comes from the ability to experiment with styles and to tie elements of diverse genres together. Still, there's no denying the influence of S.E. Hinton in Hurricane, so one can see where the description comes from.
After learning about Johnnie's apocalyptic trip in the desert (in Until the Night Turns) and his coy flirtation with death in Dead Man's Hand, this more grounded prequel turns back the clock, to show us the story of how young Johnnie got involved with the legend of the World Ender, and the gang that took their name from that mythical founder. Young, wayward Johnnie, on the hunt for a thrilling escape from humdrum life, ends up prowling the streets of an unnamed desert city, driving fast and spiking the gang's drinks with Vide Noir. The book was famously challenged - banned in several school districts, though teens interviewed never even knew it existed in the first place - for its supposed glorification of the thrill-seeking gang lifestyle. GRJ responded, in a rare letter to the press, that to see Hurricane as a glorification was an oversimplification. There's a reason it's at the end of the Redmayne trilogy and not the beginning. To the discerning reader, Johnnie's casual disregard for reality, his carefree descents into the Void, hum with foreshadowing of what's already been told, of his ultimate fate as a nameless and solitary spectre, a man of no reality. Hurricane ends with Johnnie and his "little darlin'" leaving the World Enders behind and riding off into the desert, to we-know-what fate. "Those shadows on the horizon, are they real or imagined?" says she; "Real or imagined, what does it matter?" says Johnnie.
Hurricane is one of the few stories in Strange Trails wherein the narrator isn't introduced at George's Place in the framing device. Some have speculated, then, that if all the rest of the story-tellers are in the bar, is Johnnie there too? Is he simply hung too finely between the realms of dream and reality, life and death, to be perceived - so that only the Reader, the ultimate observer, can hear him tell his tale?
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Carrying on where Until the Night Turns left off, Dead Man's Hand, the third book in the Strange Trails series, continues the Johnnie Redmayne trilogy, and the "desert era." This story is also the first told from the perspective of Buck Vernon, who would become a major character in George Ranger Johnson's interconnected universe. Buck is a washed-up country singer who never likes to talk much about his past. He's also, by his own admission, a hopeless, or is that hapless, romantic, and he's flirted with esoteric Eastern religions out of an affinity for the thought of past lives.
Responding to Dale Redmayne's story about Johnnie's literal and euphemistic trip in the desert, Buck tells the story of his own trip, admitting that he's prone to hallucinations.
Dead Man's Hand is actually one of the more straightforward Strange Trails tales, a simple Southwest-Gothic horror. Buck is returning from a trip to his home in Michigan (notably also where the long-dead cowboy Huron is from, and pledged to return to as a ghost,) when he comes across a dead body in the desert, or so it seems. Buck admits there's no way to be sure that this was Johnnie, but the description matches Dale's story (in Until the Night Turns.) Ultimately the supposedly dead man refuses to accept his own decession - it's not that he's not dead, or anything, he just doesn't want to die, so he's not going to; all clear? - and the story ends with Buck watching the revenant maybe-Johnnie run into the desert night, lost in shadow.
So where's Johnnie now? And what even is death in Johnson's world? If Huron wanted to be The Man Who Lives Forever, and Johnnie's still running away purely because he didn't feel like dying that day, then...? And who is Buck Vernon again? And who and what and why and you can see why GRJ fans gained that stereotype of the conspiracy nut.
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Johnson wanted to finish the Lonesome Dreams series before the turn of the 90s, and at last Whispering Pines agreed. But Johnson wouldn't leave Huron behind without a swan song. With some of the most wrenchingly poetic prose of his career, Johnson wrote what he intended as the penultimate Lonesome Dreams novel as a slower, more contemplative character piece, and a direct sequel to the original novel, preceding even Helena's introduction (in She Lit a Fire.) For some decades The Ghost on the Shore would be known as not the penultimate but rather the FINAL Huron story, until the posthumous publication of Setting Sun, with all the story involved therein. And as a final sendoff it's effective indeed.
In The Ghost on the Shore, Huron returns changed from his journey Past the Edge. He wanders, mind separated from body, back to the shores of his childhood and namesake Great Lake, vowing to die there, and to seek it out even if he were to die elsewhere. Here Huron communes with ghosts and foresees his own death, recontextualizing the chronologically later novels somewhat. Alongside the musings on immortality and afterlife in Lonesome Dreams, In the Wind, and The Man Who Lives Forever, "immortalists" (Johnson fans who believe that Huron's spirit canonically lived on past the end of the Lonesome Dreams series and influences other characters in his later novels) tend to use this declaration as a point of proof.
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The second Strange Trails story brought the nascent series into even more esoteric territory. Until the Night Turns begins the Johnnie Redmayne trilogy - the core part of it, as it would be followed by a sequel and a prequel. All of this, of course, exists in a subjective reality tied through storytelling to the series' continual framing device.
At George's Place, a rough-and-tumble leather-jacketed biker gang called the World Enders hangs out in the corner most nights. One of those nights, talk turns to lost family, and burly greaser Dale Redmayne tells a story about his brother, Johnnie. "Dead?" asks the barkeep; "Ain't so simple as dead or alive," Dale says, and begins his tale.
In Dale's story, Johnnie trips into the desert with his girl. The text turns a little bit Kerouac, a little bit Hunter S. Thompson, a clear sign of some of George Ranger Johnson's influences during the Strange Trails period. The drinking and drugs start spinning Johnnie's head, and here things get weird. Apocalyptic visions intertwine with the carefree thrills of the night. And briefly, at the climax of the story, we meet him. Who? As of yet it's unclear, but a figure that would become one of the pivotal characters of the series makes his first appearance.
And the canyon tearing the earth apart was grooved and rutted, treaded, patterned with jagged crevasses from which was pouring forth the fire, and Johnnie knew, it would keep on until it was all only fire across all that the night blanketed, but who had laid that track? Because the track that touched the infernal abyss was the track of a rattler, an old motorbike with its gears hanging on by thread and will and a hundred years of oil-stick, and there HE was, astride the rattler, like a cowboy, like ol’ Huron himself, taming a wild bronco, riding through the night, riding like the night, the fire pouring from his skull and scorching off all that might have been flesh and skin to leave just the shining ash bone. He'd never stop riding, and he'd never stop leaving his track, the size of the Great Canyon but pouring out the fires, more and more fire until it burned all the stars out of the sky. That was what he was riding for, the World Ender, and he was riding before them now. "Don't look away, baby," Johnnie told her. "Don't close your eyes. See him, baby. Don't close your eyes."
Johnnie's fate is left ambiguous in Dale's story. As he said, it's not as simple as dead or alive. But then, in one of GRJ's trademark cliffhangers, stalwart Buck Vernon stands up from his poker game, throwing in his hand, the eights and aces of spades and clubs. Buck had just come through that self-same desert, he says, and he's got another story to tell that just might be of interest.
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