I'm in two minds about this one. It was written long ago, and as a historical novel at that, so all the period racism is likely accurate but doesn't make it any more enjoyable to read. It's also not my usual fare... basically, the Night Riders are a sort of emerging union of tobacco farmers who are trying to band together, with increasing levels of violence, in order to get better prices for their crops from tobacco companies. Being pro-union myself, this is something I would normally have sympathy for, but that violence - and I am aware that violence was a significant part of the union movement - makes nearly all the characters increasingly unsympathetic as they get sucked further and further into some really dodgy behaviour. And, you know, stories with unlikeable protagonists can be great, but there's so many of them here, and they're nearly all so unpleasant that I can't really bring myself to sympathise with any of them. The fall of the main character, initially presented as a decent man, is, I think I am supposed to feel, some sort of rural American tragedy, but after he hurts his wife the way he does he's no longer a tragedy to me, he's someone who is just plain irredeemable, and my opinion stands despite the technical accomplishment of what Warren's accomplished here, this sucking maelstrom of poor choices that just drags character after character down and down.

All that aside, I very nearly gave this four stars, because whatever my problems with the characters, the prose is just so accomplished. It slips down so easily that the book felt a whole lot shorter than its near 500 page count would credit. And this, I understand, is a first novel. Well, I was impressed... but it is flawed in a way that a lot of first novels are flawed, and for Warren and Night Rider that flaw comes in the ending. This increasingly claustrophobic story is interrupted, in the second to last chapter, by a really tedious digression that drops all momentum dead for me. The whole of this very long chapter is a minor character recounting his life as a buffalo hunter. It's so irrelevant, and it goes on for so long, and it's just adding one more unpleasant character to the rest as he goes on about slaughtering both buffalo and Native Americans, and all I could feel was relief when it was finally over and the wish that Warren had found it within himself to kill a darling, because if ever there was a time for such a killing, it was then.

Flawed but interesting. I plan to read Warren's All the King's Men soon, so I'm interested to see how it stacks up.