The Devil's Backbone

by Bill Wittliff, Jack Unruh (Illustrator)

Overview

The last the boy Papa saw of his Momma, she was galloping away on her horse Precious in the saddle her father took from a dead Mexican officer after the Battle of San Jacinto, fleeing from his Daddy, Old Karl, a vicious, tight-fisted horse trader. Momma’s flight sets Papa on a relentless quest to find her that thrusts him and his scrappy little dog Fritz into adventures all across the wild and woolly Hill Country of Central Texas, down to Mexico, and even into the realm of the ghostly “Shimmery People.” In The Devil’s Backbone, master storyteller Bill Wittliff takes readers on an exciting journey through a rough 1880s frontier as full of colorful characters and unexpected turns of events as the great American quest novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Wittliff grew up listening to stories and memories like these in his own family, and in this imaginative novel, they come to vivid life, creating an engrossing story of a Texas Huck Finn that brims with folk wisdom and sly humor. A rogue’s gallery of characters thwart and aid Papa’s path—Old Karl, hell-bent on bringing the boy back to servitude on his farm, and Herman, Papa’s brother who’s got Old Karl’s horse-trading instincts and greed; Calley Pearsall, an enigmatic cowboy with “other Fish to Fry” who might be an outlaw or a trustworthy “o’Amigo”; o’Jeffey, a black seer who talks to the spirits but won’t tell Papa what she has divined about his Momma; Mister Pegleg, a three-legged coyote with whom Papa forms a poignant, nearly tragic friendship; the “Mexkins” Pepe and Peto and their father Old Crecencio, whose longing for his lost family is as strong as Papa’s; and blind Bird, a magical “blue baby” who can’t see with his eyes but who helps other people see what they hold in their hearts. Papa’s adventures draw him ever nearer to a mysterious cave that haunts his dreams—an actual cave that he discovers at last in the canyons of the Devil’s Backbone—but will he find Momma before Old Karl finds him?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780292759954
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	10/01/2014
Pages:	237
Product dimensions:	6.90(w) x 10.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Bill Wittliff is a distinguished screenwriter and producer, whose credits include Lonesome Dove, The Perfect Storm, The Black Stallion, and Legends of the Fall, among others. With his wife, Sally, he founded the highly regarded Encino Press and the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University–San Marcos. Wittliff’s fine art photography has been published in the books A Book of Photographs from Lonesome Dove, La Vida Brinca, and Vaquero: Genesis of the Texas Cowboy.

Jack Unruh (1935–2016) was an award-winning illustrator whose art has appeared in numerous publications, including Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, Atlantic Monthly, Time, Sports Illustrated, Readers Digest, New York Magazine, National Geographic, Sports Afield, Field and Stream, GQ, and Texas Monthly. His work has appeared in Communication Arts Illustration Annual since its inception and has been in numerous shows of American Illustration, Graphis, AIGA, and Print.

Table of Contents

• The Devil's Backbone
• Acknowledgments

What People are Saying About This

Ron Hansen

Charming and vastly entertaining . . . executed with skill, deft humor, and a fascinating Texas storyteller’s voice in perfect pitch. . . . It will interest readers just as Mark Twain did, for there is a wry, winking quality to the book, and the author is completely in control of all his materials.

Jim Harrison

Bill Wittliff’s The Devil’s Backbone is a wonderful tale that does honor to the ancient art of storytelling. It is destined to be an American classic.

Stephen Harrigan

A moving and compelling novel, told in a voice as original as any I’ve encountered in recent American fiction. . . . The book’s frontier naturalism and its mystical resonance seem perfectly fused. It’s as if Charles Portis and Gabriel García Márquez had collaborated on True Grit.

Larry McMurtry

This lively story, part novel and part yarn, is a fine read!

William Broyles

Unforgettable . . . hypnotic language, memorable characters, sly humor, deep wisdom, and fun to read. . . . I for one would keep company with Wittliff as long as he’d let me ride along.

Editorial Reviews

Readers . . . will find themselves entirely transported to a time and place as lyrically surreal as it can be chillingly real.

Texas Monthly

With his keen ear for language and knowledge of the era, Wittliff employs a vernacular as rich and colorful as Brer Rabbit’s Southern dialect or Huck Finn’s Mississippi Valley argot . . . The readers are rewarded with a lively, almost musical tale.

Austin American-Statesman

★ 2014-09-18
A Texas boy goes searching for his missing momma in an endearing picaresque that evokes Huckleberry Finn, Don Quixote and a whole passel of folk tales. The narrator of this extended shaggy dog story, the first in a series, is Papa, who's recalling his boyhood in central Texas in the 1880s. His mother has escaped the clutches of his domineering father, Old Karl, and Papa is quickly separated not just from both parents but from his brother as well. So begins the oldest story ever told—a youngster heads off on a journey—but the familiarity of the novel's setup is countered by the rounded, quirky, sometimes-creepy characters Papa encounters and the warmth of Wittliff's down-home prose. The secondary cast includes Papa's newborn half brother, whose bird-shaped birthmark holds an oracular power for those around him; Fritz, a stray dog with a strange laughing bark; Calley, a cowboy who's at once a walking essay in conditional ethics and a father figure to the boy; and Pepe and Peto, Mexican laborers who've also escaped Old Karl's heavy hand. Wittliff, who's written screenplays for Lonesome Dove and Legends of the Fall, knows his Texas tropes backward and forward. Some of those tropes are overly familiar, and characters tend to appear and disappear in ways that strain credulity. But here too Wittliff knows what he's doing: The novel is less a grab bag of episodes and symbols (though it is that) than a sophisticated consideration of interconnectedness, an idea he tinkers with on practical and metaphysical levels. The elliptical story climaxes at the ridge of the novel's title, giving the book the feel of an old-fashioned cliffhanger in its closing pages. Wittliff's Huck-ish voice sometimes runs on a bit long, but he's a font of well-told wisdom, and Unruh's illustrations show key moments in the story with appropriately warped perspective and detail.An unpretentious but smart reboot of Wild West storytelling.

Kirkus Reviews