“Teran’s storytelling has a mythic quality to it, and his recreation of a violent era in American history will resonate with many today. Fans of Charles Portis and Philipp Meyer will be enthralled.”
– Publishers Weekly Starred Review
“A beautifully written, brutally uncompromising Western masterpiece, with Crippled Jack, Boston Teran has once again proven himself the modern master of historical fiction, writing history with poetry and lightning! Highly recommended and one of the best novels of the year!”
– Eric Petersen, Internet Review of Books
“Readers of Western fiction well know the tendency towards formula writing that this genre holds. That’s why Crippled Jack by Boston Teran is such a standout. It’s revisionist writing at its best, turning the Western genre on end with a story that is delightfully unexpected and evocative. Libraries…as well as book clubs reading Westerns who seek reads both satisfyingly complex and outstandingly unique, will both find Crippled Jack absorbing and refreshingly original writing.”
– Diane Donovan, Midwest Book Review
“Crippled Jack whacks you upside the head from its first page to its final bloody act. Teran’s language, like his character, is at times blunt, other times poetic and always barreling like a freight train through an array of robber barons, Pinkerton lackeys and working families mired in poverty and the Colorado silver mines. Wrought with tension and rife with blood as the frontier it inhabits, its hard-scrabble politics and philosophical bent anchors Teran’s story with the gravity of a moral reckoning that transcends Crippled Jack’s times and mirrors our own.”
– Bruce Holbert, author of Lonesome Animals and The Hour of Lead
CRIPPLED JACK is a revisionist western set against a landmark era in American folklore. Those were the years of poverty, homelessness and hatred between the classes.
In that time when bloodthirsty violence ruled the day a boy was bound and gagged and left to die in the desert. He was not yet nine and suffered what they called the palsy. There was a note pinned to his chest – It’s up to God now.
But the boy did not die. Fate and history merged in his will to live. He was found by a horseman who was at war with the profiteers of the day, the Czars of business, the masters of corporate avarice. He was known as – The Coffin Maker.
He became the star on the boy’s horizon. The boy would grow to become an expert marksman known as Crippled Jack. He will come of age during the labor wars that were consuming the West. His friends will be enemies of the state. He will come to love a woman who has escaped the orphan trains and is a reporter covering the bloodshed sweeping the nation.
Together they will usher in a new America. An America that has every intention of turning the country upside down, so that it may stand right side up.
CRIPPLED JACK transforms the classic American western into a scathing and violent protest novel. A war for social justice, for equality, and for hope – a war we’re still fighting today.