Since Wallace Stegner’s death, there is perhaps no one better qualified to make sweeping statements on Western culture and history than Larry McMurtry. From his familial background (Texas homesteaders) to his own experiences in cowboying, bookselling, writing and research, McMurtry is pedigreed like nobody’s business. This is a book he should have been able to write in his sleep.
Maybe he did.
— Allen M. Jones reviewing Larry McMurtry’s Oh What a Slaughter for New West Network.
Of course, Jones is disappointed because McMurtry can write at the highest level:
His best novels — Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show, All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers — are all ambushes of emotion, everyman oomphs of grief and redemption. No flourishes of purple prose, no narrative strutting. Here’s just a handful of people you can care about, and here are some of the bad (and good) things that happen to them. His life’s masterpiece, the Pulitzer Prize winning Lonesome Dove, is a staggering achievement of invisible research and camouflaged, authorial labor. Anyone who can read about the death of Augustus McCrae without threatening tears has a chunk of vulcanized rubber for a heart.
Oh What a Slaughter is a short, nonfiction survey of several western massacres.