The Death Shot - A Story Retold by Mayne Reid AUDIOBOOK

Mayne Reid’s "The Death Shot – A Story Retold" stands as a striking testament to the author’s dramatic storytelling and his engagement with the historical complexities of 19th-century America. Originally composed amid personal adversity, and later carefully reworked, this novel reflects a keenly atmospheric vision—a romance intertwined with the suspense of survival and the stark realities of postbellum society.

Set in Texas and the Mississippi Valley during the waning days of American slavery, Reid exposes the contrasting characters and moral landscapes of two Southern planters: the benevolent Colonel Armstrong and the pitiless Ephraim Darke. Through their lives, Reid explores themes of justice and inhumanity, the burden of legacy, and the corrosive effects of power. The historical framing is rendered with vivid, sometimes harrowing, precision—coyotes and vultures circle a landscape haunted by violence and unresolved tension, and human suffering is never far from view.

Reid’s style is marked by painterly descriptions and a taste for the gothic. The prologue opens with a surreal tableau: a living man’s head, surrounded by predators on a twilight prairie, evoking both the wildness of the land and the spectral dimension of fate. The writing blends realism and melodrama, evoking a world where every detail, from the lash of a whip to the sway of prairie grass, speaks volumes about character and circumstance. The moral tensions are laid bare, yet nuanced—Reid neither romanticizes nor shies away from the difficult truths of his subject.

For the modern listener, "The Death Shot" offers both the pleasures of high adventure and the depth of a social novel wrestling with foundational questions of justice, cruelty, and redemption. Richly atmospheric and meticulously composed, this work remains a compelling window onto a turbulent era and an example of Victorian adventure fiction at its most ambitious.

Audiobook time & format : 14h7m41s, OPUS, 659 Mo
Audiobook free extract time & format : 5m (see below to listen), WAV
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