Sin Killer (The Berrybender Narratives, #1) by Larry McMurtry

Sin Killer (The Berrybender Narratives, #1) Reviews

• 
  Ivie dan Glokta

  First of all.... BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
  
  Let me warn you upfront...
  
  If you are the overly sensitive, blushing, color within the lines, you know - that very special type of delicate flower, then by all means move the fuck away and make sure to take your smelling salts with you. This book is definitely not for you.
  
  I volunteer a day a week in a charity oriented used book store. The place is massive, the place is brilliant and most of all it has a lush, constant circulation of novels that come from people's loved sometimes even life long collections. You get to find those nuggets, long forgotten. The difference between the used book stores and the polished – brand spanking new – ones is simple. The books in the used book store are affordable, were talking .99 here. They are pre-loved and it shows, and they usually come with an honest recommendation, not the stupid marketing ploy bullshit. So needless to say, for one day a week, I am in heaven.
  
  When I stumbled on the Berrybender Narratives, they came from a guy with a sharp mind and a wicked sense of humour. He said → “The series is inappropriate in the true sense of the word, being laden with innuendos, gender stereotypes and surprising amount of gore.... and it was funny as hell.”
  
  No way I was going to pass on that. So, naturally I got it.
  
  He was absolutely right. The narrative presents us with a rich snob of an English Lord, his daughters that have characters worthy of their fathers upbringing all stranded in the New Country with their aristocratic mentality in a very raw and unforgiving land. The clash of cultures is astounding as well as sometimes incredibly shocking, but what takes the cake here was the fact that Larry made you try and think, try and envision the actual turn of events back in the day. The book is brutal, written in an unflinchingly bold way that would undoubtedly make many squeamish. That's why I have enjoyed it so much. Civilization as we know it is in fact very young, and we as a people still rush to forget the brutal ways we used to deal with each other throughout history. It shakes us to the core, the real fact that we used to be cruel and cutthroat and we tend to dismiss anything or anyone that dares to remind us of that.
  
  So I say, good on you Larry! I say good on you, because when I have checked and seen that this book was published only ten years ago, I was amazed by the guy's cajones. This takes guts to be open about the past in unforgiving times such as this. Needles to say it reflects in the ratings. The book is patronizing, brutal, sexist and insulting at times, everything that we as a society openly were until just a few decades ago- and still I've managed to bust a gut while reading it.
  
  And no, my sensitive ones, this doesn't mean that I condone these types of behavior in my everyday existence.
• 
  Julie G

  I suspect that Mr. McMurtry had as much fun writing this novel as I did, reading it!
• 
  aPriL does feral sometimes

  The Berrybenders, a family of rich English aristocrats, decide to take a journey up the Missouri River in 1830's America. The goal is to see the Wild West of buffalo, Indians, frontiersmen and trappers, so with great anticipation, they lease a large boat, the steamer Rocky Mount, which is able to carry everything they need for comfort - food, servants, tutors, guides, clothes, weapons. However, the family expects America to conform to the usual social conventions of English society, particularly the milieu of England's country manors. None of them realize Americans have very little idea of their expectations. Most of the family sees the trip the same way as we would view a trip to Disney World. As a result, the English servants and tutors despise them, while the American guides are mystified by their behavior.
  
  Being a free agent of one's own destiny is rather terrifying in these circumstances. The adventure quickly becomes very messy, with preventable accidents, kidnappings, deaths and rapes.
  
  All in good fun! Honest! This novel is pure farce, similar to the popular movies made in the 1930's
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw.... (However, whatever wit the author includes is only in playing with genre conventions, not in the dialogue. The prose is straightforward, not clever.)
  
  Educated Tasmin is the eldest daughter of Lord and Lady Berrybender. Also traveling with her are her parents and a few of her ten brothers and sisters - Bobbety, Bess and Mary. Mary, age twelve, is considered by the family to be the peculiar strange child, but all of these characters appear to be remarkably free of emotional attachments to each other.
  
  Tasmin is desperate to separate herself from her loathsome fellow travelers, so she sneaks off the boat and falls asleep in her pirogue. She is rescued (although she is unaware that she is being rescued since she is clueless about danger of any kind, as are all of the Berrybenders) by an inarticulate dirty hairy uneducated Christian fundamentalist Indian fighter, Jim Snow. She immediately falls in love with him, despite his ignorant brutality and abuse, so she plots to get him to marry her (none of the older Berrybender children are virgins since they all begin to consort with grooms and hunters and servants early - Lord Berrybender is thought to have a possible 30 bastards in addition to his ten actual recognized children).
  
  Tasmin is not going to allow her family of idiots to prevent her Grand Romance with primitive America (as if their self-involvement already hadn't precluded any attempt at noticing she was even missing). However, this New World is a place where there are no rules, including those of genre conventions, except to turn everything upside down...
  
• 
  Mikey B.

  A ripping good yarn! Mr.McMurtry spins a tale of the American West circa 1830’s somewhere on the Missouri River. Mr. McMurtry is a skilled story-teller with wonderful dialogue and vast settings on the prairies – an unforgiveable landscape with the approach of winter. We are given a cavalcade of diverse characters, but we never lose track of who is who.
  
  The basic story is of the rich aristocratic Berrybender’s from England making their way along the Missouri River sight-seeing the American frontier. The main character is Tasmin (the rich aristocrat’s eldest and flamboyant daughter) who on occasion strikes out on her own, becomes infatuated with a stoic frontiersman, marries this rather primitive fellow and subsequently becomes pregnant. I did find Tasmin’s on and off again relationship with this Jim guy (aka Sin Killer) stretched my credibility - how could this upper class independent woman find happiness with this dim-wit, mealy-mouthed American. They were both independent – she intellectually and he a self-sufficient, but illiterate prairie food-gatherer.
  
  As for a correction, there were French-Canadians guides on this well-stocked expedition who were referred to erroneously by the author as “Quebecois”. “Quebecois” is a term that came out of 1960’s Quebec. In the 1800’s these explorers would have been called “Canadiens”.
  
  Also this is the first of four volumes – so the ending is sort of open-ended, but we are NOT left in the middle of a dangling mystery!
  An entertaining story in every sense of the word!
  
• 
  Steven

  Someone on the dust jacket said the Berrybender novels turn the western epic (Lonesome Dove) on its comedic ear. These books are farcical at times, but you can't help loving the crazy circus of characters. Every side-show freak of the Old West (real or dime novel version) is here, relishing in all their crazed glory.
  
  But McMurtry writes affectionately about these people. They may be freaks, but they're his freaks and he loves them. You will too.
  
  By the end of the fourth book, I found myself repeatedly amazed all over again by McMurtry's ability to so perfectly render a character. After literally thousands of pages, the choices these people make remain consistent with who they were years and years before. On this, McMurtry has a gift, an astounding perfect pitch. His characters learn and grow and mature over the years and the miles. But their souls, their hearts or temperaments or whatever remain consistent. When the books were over, I missed the Berrybenders and the incredible man called the Sin Killer.
• 
  Derrick Jeter

  Larry McMurtry reinvented the Western novel. With his debut, “Horsemen Pass By” to his Pulitzer Prize winning “Lonesome Dove,” McMurtry broke from the conventional Western made popular by Zane Gray in the early twentieth century and Louis L’Amour in the mid-twentieth century and portrayed the West—whether historical or modern—with more grit and grim.
  
  McMurtry’s speciality is character development. And perhaps no Western character is more beloved than “Lonesome Dove’s” Augustus McCree. McMurtry knows how to capture the essence and quirkiness of a character. None do it better in any genre. McMurtry doesn’t disappoint in painting the pen portrait of his heroin, Tasmin, in “Sin Killer,” the first his Berrybender Narratives—a tetralogy, or series of four volumes following the lives and adventures of the noble English Berrybender family as they explore the American West. Traveling the Missouri River, Tasmin and the various Berrybenders encounter a score of troubles from Indians, the weather, and their own folly.
  
  “Sin Killers” is at once a quick and accessible read with the feel of an epic novel. It is the epic nature of the four volume series that seems to give this first novel an overwritten quality. McMurtry knew financial success from the very beginning of his career. “Horsemen Pass By” sold (and continues to sell) hundreds of thousands of copies and was made into a major movie staring Paul Newman and Patricia O’Neil, “Hud.” And he won critical acclaim with “Lonesome Dove,” which was made into major mini-series for television. From such heights McMurtry has never descended. But it might be such heights that gives “Sin Killer” such a lazy feel to the writing. McMurtry doesn’t have the reputation of trying to tackle big ideas or trying to push the cultural boundaries in his novels, but the ideas in “Sin Killer,” written by a more mature McMurtry, don’t live up to the earlier works of “Horsemen Pass By” or “Lonesome Dove.”
  
  “Sin Killer” is a good summer beach read, but there’s not much sin to kill within its pages, and I think that’s a sin . . . committed by one of the finest American writers of our generation.
• 
  Kevin

  Another one I couldn’t finish. I think McMurtry is off and on. Some I love (Lonesome Dove, Last Picture Show) and some I detest (Comanche Moon). What was this—a comedy, drama? Most characters were buffoons; none were interesting enough to follow. I’m not wasting any more time on this review and would rather stick pins in my eyes than read three more (3!!!) incarnations.
• 
  Emma Troyer

  It is only my loyalty to Larry McMurtry that prevents me from giving this only one star. Or none at all. Seriously, really, really weird.
• 
  Buz

  I was thinking about the Lonesome Dove series when I picked up Sin Killer (the first book in Larry McMurtry’s Berrybender series), and I did find a strong “historical western” foundation, with plenty of action involving the frontier, wild Indians, buffalo, violent deaths, accidents, kidnappings, etc. But I also found a high level of humor and farce. As winter approaches, the somewhat ridiculous and highly entertaining Berrybender family (of England) strives to travel up the Missouri River in a very large steamboat. In other words, rich and spoiled English nobility (with all of their various servants) thrown into the wild and dangerous American frontier. Because I was expecting something else, I was a little put off by the silly Berrybenders at first, but as I said, there is a lot of historical accuracy (and there are many serious situations) to be found in this very funny book, and now that I have reached the end of it, I must admit to having a morbid fascination with this train-wreck of a family. I’ve been sucked in, so here I go to book #2…
• 
  Emma

  I loved Lonesome Dove and Terms of Endearment. Loved. But, while I thought Sin Killer was at times funny, in the beginning, it had a certain shallowness to it that made me watch the characters, instead of living their lives.
  
  McMurtry, as a rule, does not care about 'show don't tell', he steadfast labels emotions instead of allowing the reader to live through them by showing them. When the cast is not this big (and generally unlikeable) his way of writing still works because of McMurtry's other qualities.
  Sin Killer lacked this.
  
  Women all wantonly wanted to have sex in this book. All women. Unless they were being (gang) raped by Indians. But they didn't have an emotional reaction to the latter that the reader could see, so that the rape did not have any impact on reader or character than dinner. One of the characters afterwards decides to become a nun. That's the response to it all. Can it get anymore card board?
  Being hit by a woman later on does provoke a violent reaction in one of the raped women. Being hit after all is worse than being raped...
  
  It's hard to suspend disbelieve in the women in this book. It's very hard not to notice this uninformed, unemphatic, lustful male point of view. As the male characters are not particularly sympathetic too, there's no one to care for in the book.
  
  
• 
  Kim Becker (MIDDLE of the Book MARCH)

  Ever since "Lonesome Dove" I've wanted to read something else by Larry McMurtry. This was no comparison to LD but was still enjoyable. The book is very funny, bawdy, and filled with superficial, whiny, entitled, messed-up characters who made me laugh and sigh with frustration.
  
  The Berrybenders are a wealthy English family coming to the American prairie to seek adventure...a new experience...a new outlook...who knows. They are so dysfunctional and simpering, with Lord Berrybender leading the jewel-encrusted way. On the journey he doesn't only bring his wife and several of his almost 2 dozen children, but his mistress, entertainers, and multiple servants. His oldest daughter (her paternity in question) is so sick of her gratuitously rude and boorish family that she runs off and finds a frontiersman who she promptly marries. In her rush, we see that she is just as entitled and simpering as her family, if not more enlightened.
  
  McMurtry develops the characters very well, sets his story in the Western plains settings we are familiar with in his novels, and introduces the first of a quartet of Berrybender narratives. I wouldn't call it his best work, or a 5 star read but it was enjoyable and I ordered the second installment for the future.
  
  Oh...and a great title! Revelation of its meaning early in the book.
• 
  Michael Romeo Talks Books

  My latest encounter with a disappointing read is Larry McMurtry’s Sin Killer. I like McMurtry. I am an avid fan of Lonesome Dove and rank it high on my list of personal favorites. I’ve read some of his earlier works including The Last Picture Show which swept me into its soap opera like drama. But Sin Killer, the first of a four book series called The Berrybender Chronicles, left me cold. The plot was clever enough; a spoiled and eccentric English aristocratic family decides to tour the American West which is just opening up. They get much more than they were prepared for. Along the way the eldest daughter meets and falls in love with Raven Brave aka Sin Killer, a self-taught evangelist-hunter-tracker-guide who received the call of God when struck by lightning. The problem with the story is there is no one to like. All the characters are either boring or despicable. I found halfway through that I no longer cared what happened to these people. There is little chance I will continue onto the remainder of the series. I am also wondering what I will encounter with the other unread McMurtry books on my shelf.
• 
  Joel Kimmel

  This was a bit silly. There are quite a lot of characters but it isn't overwhelming try to remember who everyone is or what their relations are to each other. This wasn't McMurtry at his best and I didn't find any of it to be too thoughtful. It's just a goofy journey up the river on a big boat and some upper crust people who aren't used to the Wild West are thrust into its wilderness, or at least on the safe river, until they venture to land out of boredom.
  I might read the others in this series, but I'm not dying to read them.
• 
  Jimmy

  I love McMurtry. Like his other westerns, this one has everything you could possibly want in another fantastically entertaining story by him: humor, action, sex, great characters. You name it. Moral values? Ehhhhhhhhh . . . I don't know about that one. But I do know that great westerns like great war stories strip people down to their bare bones. And they behave like you would expect them to behave, like animals. An occasional animal will know how to do the right thing.
• 
  Wade

  I'll have to check out some more of this series. The setting intrigued me (rich Englishman brings his family to frontier America = recipe for disaster) and the characters and situations all held my interest, but it never really sucked me in. I do see plenty of potential, so I'll be back!
• 
  Tom

  This book made me wish I was illiterate. I would prefer to watch cartoons.
• 
  Mike Futcher

  An odd and hectic piece – a sort of vaudeville Western. Sin Killer, at first, seems like a mistake; the premise of a family of aristocratic Brits (the wackily-named Berrybenders) raising hell on the American frontier in the year of our Lord 1832 is a joke that threatens to tire before it's even begun. The writing style is more affected than author Larry McMurtry's usual moreish prose (though the storytelling ability is still there), and there is an unremitting onslaught of boorish and entitled behaviour from the aristos, along with bursts of bawdy humour and vomit and erections. It can be disconcerting to switch from this sort of content to the book's incidents of rape, violence and elemental hardship. And any attempt by the reader to discern a literary motive to McMurtry's novel – namely the contrast between Old World and New, settled and unsettled (pg. 36) – quickly leads them to throw up their hands. The Berrybenders left England on a "whim" (pg. 24); and "what the passengers meant to do in such wild country was a puzzle" (pg. 94).
  
  Fortunately, once you do throw up your hands in defeat the book becomes a bit more palatable. McMurtry knows his genre, and despite the outlandish goings-on, his West always comes across as authentic. Those boorish and scatter-brained characters begin to develop a bit – it helps that a goodly few get killed off – and the book begins to settle. Those hectic "alarums" which are "merely the stuff of day-to-day life, when the Berrybenders are assembled" (pg. 294) become less grating, and the parameters of the story begin to become more defined. A shame, then, that it's at this point the book ends without much sense of occasion: Sin Killer is most definitely Part One of an ongoing story than a book that can stand on its own two feet. Once you accept this isn't going to be your typical Western – not even your typical McMurtry Western – its own charm emerges, even if it remains a rather shallow charm. Some of the characters may even grow on you, which when combined with the general ease and breeziness of the read, makes picking up the second book a prospect.
• 
  Mary

  Slow to get going, but then I was. hooked. It is about the old West. A rich man from England takes a trip in America w/ all his entourage with him, including several children. One is very adventurous, and takes off in a boat, falls asleep and lost, but a young man (hunter, who grew up w/ the Ute and was bought by a preacher), takes her back to her boat. He is a young man of few words, who does not behave like most men she has known, and can't seem to get him out of her mind... Fast paced and many surprises as the dangers of the area take their toll. But, at the end I find out it is one of a series, and this is only part one!
• 
  Michael Sigler

  Not exactly what I was expecting from a Larry McMurtry book, but not at all unwelcomed. I think 'Sin Killer' is much better than most reviewers say it is and, though slow in the first quarter, is a well-written and engaging novel.
• 
  Kaitlin Jundt

  This book had its moments of adventure and humor. I feel like it could've been a lot shorter and to the point. The characters were hilarious and the scenery was perfect for a western novel.
• 
  Bob Box

  Read in 2002. A truly unique view of the West.
• 
  Jay Wright

  I was not much impressed with this book. Frankly it is about a bunch of deranged English and their servants on a trip to the Western United States in 1832. It is too foolish to be believed and I rarely see as much “fornicating” in one book since I read the second book in the series. I think he was trying to recreate Lonesome Dove, but he fails. Still the book has some entertainment value thus the rating.
• 
  Richard Schaefer

  The first volume of the Berrybender Narratives (the only books McMurtry wrote as a series, stated as such from the publication of the first book), Sin Killer is the beginning of a fairly epic story of the West. The writing style is drastically different from any other McMurtry book I’ve read, starting with a more high-handed style that matches the aristocratic British family the series is ostensibly about. But once the story gets underway, the style stops being a distraction, and it also becomes clear this story is about much more than the Berrybenders themselves. There are elements of Westerns, adventure, action, and literature throughout this book, and the characters, in classic McMurtry fashion, feel real. It’s violent but also full of humor (sometimes at the same time), but never falls into farce. It’s hard to judge a longer book from the first volume, but this series is shaping up to be the epic it was billed as when published. I look forward to continuing on the Berrybenders’ westward journey.
• 
  Nigel

  Oh lor', when the literary blurbs, and this has a lot of literary blurbs, tell you what an hilarious piece of literature you are about to read, then seriously consider ripping out those pages and pages of literary blurbs and making paper aeroplanes out of them and sending them flying to Antarctica. Sin Killer is funny, make no mistake, but, as is often the case with certain types of literary comedy, it's the sort of humour that involves somewhat grotesque characters slipping on banana peels and injuring themselves horribly and dying a long slow painful death crying pitifully for their mothers so that you come to hate yourself for ever having laughed at them in the first place.
  
  Death stalks the American West of Larry McMurtry in many and varied forms, from sheer accident to Indians, slavers, weather and geography, plucking at the fringes of the party of the appalling Lord Berrybender, over from England to shoot lots of things, drinking claret and pleasuring himself on his mistress and either neglecting appallingly or verbally abusing his varied offspring. Elder daughter, Tasmin, spirited and spoiled, has a chance encounter on the banks of the Missouri Rover with the fierce but taciturn young trapper Sin Killer, leading to a tempestuous union where physical desire overmatches any sense of personal compatibility. As the Berrybenders and entourage voyage up the river, Tasmin and Sin Killer's relationship is the centrepiece around which swirls comings and goings, conflicts and fights, blunders and captures, torments and murders; and you know by the time you get to the end that there must be more books to come because, somehow, there are still plenty of characters left to kill.
  
  It is brilliant, though. Nobody demytholigises the West like McMurtry, and this comic tragedy of the aristocracy of old Europe clashing with the democratic chaos of the Western Frontier, an advance party of the civilised despoilation of the great wilderness, leaves no myth standing. Arguably, of course, he replaces it with potentially enduring myths of his own, but whether these myths are closer to the truth, as if such a thing were knowable, is hard to say. Great to read, though.
• 
  Katherine

  You know about the red shirt syndrome in Star Trek right? Well every character in this book is wearing a red Star Trek uniform. Metaphorically speaking of course. It's been years and years since I read Lonesome Dove but it's all coming back to me now - Larry McMurtry's style. It doesn't take too long to get into the book and we are off an amazing fast-paced adventure. Where any one of the many characters can get snuffed out at any moment. Death is almost like rain in this book - it comes and goes and anyone can get caught in it and the attitude of most seems to be - 'meh'. To this end, I sometimes find his characters a bit two-dimensional but the truly likable bits of the first in this tetralogy are the comedic prose and the non-stop moving plot. Like Lonesome Dove, our main characters (an upper-class English family completely out of their element) find themselves traversing across the the wild west, stumbling across all sundry of friendly and not-so-friendly Indians and local frontiersmen. It's impossible not to compare this to Lonesome Dove, and the humor and adventure is all in the same spirit. I'm looking forward to the other 3 books in the series and it's nice to read another Western. It's been a while.
• 
  Mallory

  I took this with me to Ocean City and it was definitely a vacation-worthy read. Love to have books that are about travel or journeys while I’m traveling! The idiosyncratic, dysfunctional, very English Berrybender family are traveling through the American West and it’s a comedy of errors right from the start. It often gets very bawdy and violent, but I found it an entertaining trip. What struck me the most was the many disparate cultures that flowed through this time period and place in American history. They didn’t always like each other, but usually managed to work together, forming fascinating partnerships and business associations. This is the first book of four and I am ready and willing to follow the Berrybenders on their continuing journey.
  
  Favorite quotes: “[Tasmin] had quickly acquired the American habit of addressing all problems as violently as possible.”
  
  “He meant to call his portfolio ‘Vanishing Races,’ and he knew the native races would vanish – the very fact that he was traveling up the Missouri in a steamboat meant that, for these wild, warring peoples, the end was not far off.”