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    Deadwood: A Novel
    Deadwood: A Novel
    Deadwood: A Novel
    Audiobook16 hours

    Deadwood: A Novel

    Written by Peter Dexter

    Narrated by J. Rodney Turner

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Deadwood, Dakota Territories, 1876: Legendary gunman Wild Bill Hickcock and his friend Charlie Utter have come to the Black Hills town of Deadwood fresh from Cheyenne, fleeing an ungrateful populace. Bill, aging and sick but still able to best any man in a fair gunfight, just wants to be left alone to drink and play cards. But in this town of played-out miners, bounty hunters, upstairs girls, Chinese immigrants, and various other entrepreneurs and miscreants, he finds himself pursued by a vicious sheriff, a perverse whore man bent on revenge, and a besotted Calamity Jane. Fueled by liquor, sex, and violence, this is the real wild west, unlike anything portrayed in the dime novels that first told its story.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 12, 2019
    ISBN9781977339492
    Deadwood: A Novel

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    Reviews for Deadwood

    4/5

    176 ratings12 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Things you need to know about Deadwood: most of the characters are real. Some of the events are real. Pete Dexter is funny AF in Deadwood, but take caution because there are just as many of disturbing scenes to match. Taking place in mid 1870s, readers plop themselves down in the middle of the Dakotas during the Gold Rush era. Violence and prostitution rule the plot. This should not be a surprise as Wild Bill Hickok, Charley Utter, Calamity Jane, China Doll, and Bill's wife, Agnes, all get a chapter in Deadwood. Confessional: I didn't see much of a point to Deadwood. I never connected with any of the characters and I got weary of all the gunslinging.
    • 5/5
      Had no idea the TV show was based on this until I listened to Backlisted. A rich, grimy stew of a book that makes you feel the gritty, sordid daily life of the West through several linked lives. A novel that's incidentally a Western. Maybe not the Great American Novel but will do until something better comes along.
    • 4/5
      Hard to get into at first, but then the story started to come together. What a cast of characters. How did we survive this period in history?
    • 2/5
      It is probably a fine book, but the genre aspects actively repelled me. Not my style at all.
    • 5/5
      I watched every episode of the Deadwood series, and was so disappointed when it ended so abruptly after only 3 seasons. When I saw that this book was actualy the book that David Milch built his series around, I had to read it. The book is similar in many ways to the excellent series, but it is different too. It's actually much deeper and Charlie Utter (one of my characters in the series) is the main character in the book. He is the glue that holds everything together. The book is totally surprising, and there is so much depicted in it. Utter is the voice of reason in the wilds of Deadwood. He's a man who is best friend to the legend, Wild Bill Hickok, and he's a man who studies and examines humankind all around him, and even if he's not surprised at the depravity he encounters, his ability to mediate and provide a voice of reason even under the most shocking circumstanes, helps his friends and acquaintenances through difficult times. Charlie is very much a man of his time (1870's), but he's also a modern man in a changing world. The book is hilariously funny in spots, and totally shocking in others, but through it all we have Charlie making his way through it, and his experiences are so well depicted that it helps us assimilate the multitude of humanity and the multitude of viloence in Deadwood, USA. I didn't think I'd find another book about the old west that I would like as much as Lonesome Dove, but this book can hold its' place beside Lonesome Dove and even rises above in many aspects.
    • 4/5
      Yup, there was a very successful HBO series by the same name. Other than the characters and the setting, there were few similarities that I could remember. If you weren't a fan of the series, don't let that stop you. If you were a fan, prepare to be entertained all over again. This book is great.

      It's the characters stupid, it's the characters. From Wild Bill Hickok, the book's centerpiece, to Calamity Jane, who's looking for love in all the wrong places. From Charley Utter, Bill's best friend to Seth Bullock, the sheriff of Deadwood, the characters steal the show. This is what writing is about folks. And sorry, no zombies, or the collapse of the modern world as we know it in this one. This is just you, walking the muddy, rutted streets of Deadwood, South Dakota with Hickok and Utter, looking to expand their historical significance and wealth in the Badlands. But, these are the real characters, not the Saturday night, network TV variety. These Deadwood residents provide us with the thoughts, ambitions, greed and fears that must have been part of daily life in the cruel and uncivilized west. This is Mad Men in the 1870's.
    • 3/5
      This took some time to get into but once I did, it was well worth the effort. It tells the story of Deadwood when Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane were in residence. However, Charlie Utter is the main character who is in every chapter. To see a photo of him, check Wikipedia. This is a very gritty, violent telling of life on the frontier. When one Chinese whore breaks her master's rule, he kills her and cuts her into pieces. The descriptions of the muddy streets and shaky buildings make you feel you are there.I did some research on the famous personalities in the book and Dexter kept the facts very close to what is known about them.
    • 1/5
      Perhaps if I actually liked westerns and had chosen to read this, I would be able to comment on the clever writing and vivid imagery. But I don't, and I didn't. It was assigned in an American Lit class, and I grudgingly forced my way through this extended portrait of human ugliness. Reading this book felt like watching 'Gangs of New York' . . . disturbing, gross, desensitizing, boring.
    • 5/5
      Deadwood by Pete Dexter was first published the same year as Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove which won the Pulitzer Prize for 1986. The award could have just as easily gone to Deadwood as both books are very well written and both books turn the western genre on its head in just about the same way.The American western has not been the clean-cut altruistic battle between good and evil that many people view it as for some time. Even John Wayne's movies moved into gray areas. The Searchers, for example, seems like a simplistic story about how bad Indians are, but if you look closely enough, if you can get past the obvious racism in the movie, you'll find that Wayne's character, the character who hates the Indians the most, is the one character that is no longer welcome in society. It's not the girl raised by Indians but Wayne who cannot return to white "civilization" in the end. Even a character as noble as Shane has to leave town in the end of the movie because there is no place for an ex-gunfighter anymore. Taking the turn towards the amoral man-with-no-name stories of the Clint Eastwood type just wasn't all that big of a leap. Westerns were already on the way there.What was new with books like Lonesome Dove and Deadwood was the way they took historical figures and events and presented them in a raw, unvarnished, style that bordered on revisionist history. I'm not well-versed enough in the genre to say with certainty, but I imagine both novels were heavily influenced by the new takes on the American West that historians were writing in the 1970's and 80's which presented versions of history that focused on Native Americans, Mexicans, Chinese immigrants, freed slaves and women rather than on the on-going, unquestioned story of Manifest Destiny.Pete Dexter's Deadwood differs from Lonesome Dove in that all of the characters in it are based on historical people, even the very minor ones. Deadwood could almost pass as the sort of new-journalism Truman Capote was aiming for with In Cold Blood, it's just about a non-fiction novel as far as I can tell. It's also a novel with an ensemble cast, something not typically found in a western. The setting is Deadwood, South Dakota during the early years of the town's existence. Deadwood began as an illegal settlement of miners who violated treaties with Native American tribes in order to prospect for gold in the Black Hills of the Dakota territory. The men who went there at first were all law-breakers just by being there so the overall lawlessness of the place should come as no surprise. The women of Deadwood, at least at first, were largely made up of prostitutes, portrayed in Deadwood as essentially slaves owned body-and-soul by the men who ran the brothels. This is not the Dakota territory of Laura Ingalls Wilder. The characters in Deadwood include Wild Bill Hickock, Calamity Jane Cannary, Sheriff Seth Bullock, and Charley Utter who functions as the linchpin that keeps all of the other characters together. Utter, a truly decent man, has followed Hickock to Deadwood which has just passed its initial glory days as a mining boom town. Hickock is dying, probably from Syphilis, but his presence will haunt the story and the town long after he has been gunned down. The other characters and their stories circle around Utter who is the one character to continue throughout the entire novel in part because he is one of the historical figures to remain in the area until the end of his life and he seems to have known just about everyone at least in passing.If books like Deadwood and Lonesome Dove can be said to have moved the western genre forward then the HBO television series Deadwood can be seen has having moved westerns back a bit. (The two appear to be unconnected; there is no credit to Mr. Dexter on the official HBO Deadwood website which I find a bit hard to believe.) The novel is focused on the character of Charley Utter who serves as a moral compass for everyone else, albeit perhaps a damaged one, but Mr. Utter plays a much more secondary role in the series. The television series, instead, sets up an on-going rivalry between Sheriff Seth Bullock, who is morally upright, and Al Swearengen who ends up being a brothel owner with a heart of gold. By the final episodes of the television series the audience is rooting for Swearengen even while his actions remain repulsive. This is not possible in the novel. The Seth Bullock of the novel is not entirely likable the way he is in the series, and Al Swearengen is completely despicable. The Chinese immigrants who lived in Deadwood play a serious part in the novel, several of them are featured characters, but they are basically reduced to a single single role throughout most of the series. This seems like a great oversight on the part of the series in my view since the experience of Chinese immigrants in the American West is not one many Americans know well. It strikes me that it could have been a very rich source for possible story lines. According to Wikipedia the owner of the most prosperous brothels in Deadwood were women whom neither the novel nor the television series feature. In both, characters move in and out of the story, just as real people moved in and out of Deadwood, South Dakota. Some are more compelling than others and the resulting novel, like the television series, has a plot like a soap opera--events build to a climax and then keep on going to another climax next week instead of building for a big climactic finish. Things don't really end, except in death, people just move along. Maybe, in the end, that is the story of the American West.
    • 4/5
      Dexter's ability to marry character and language is delightful. He is one of those rare writers who can portray deep emotion without slipping into the sentimental. Yes, the book might be subtitled, "Camp Crusty" due to profanity and sexual content, but it's also extremely funny and full of compassion. Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Pete Dexter's Deadwood hews closely to historical reality. The characters are there from the well-known Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane Cannary to the lesser known but vital Charlie Utter, Hickok's widow, Agnes Lake, the China Doll, and a host of others. The events are there from the murder of Hickok to the great Deadwood fire. Are the characters drawn accurately? It seems so - certainly more accurately than the HBO series of the same name (You won't find HBO's Al Swearengen in Dexter's pages). Much of the book is taken up with tortured internal dialogues, especially of Hitchcock's buddy Charlie Utter. Many of the characters are at least half insane and in poor Jane's case, well over half. Cruelty is the rule not the exception. Dexter's `Deadwood' is an unhappy place. By the way, according to a story from the Rapid City Journal newspaper posted on the web page `Deadwood Discovered, the HBO series is not based on Dexter's book and Dexter says he does not watch the show - his loss in my opinion. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      Loved. This. Book. I already loved the Deadwood series on HBO and wondered if I would like or hate this book, since it's on the same subject, also fictional, and not necessarily what the series on HBO was based on. And while it was different from the television show, it was really raw and gritty also. Who knew I'd ever come to love a Western?