As you've probably guessed by now, Black Hills is one of those books. Dan Simmons is one of the most interesting authors writing today. You just never know what to expect from him, and his three most recent novels show this most admirably. They display the potentials of historical fiction in a way usually unseen in the work of a single author.
The Terror was pure horror about a stranded ship and the mysterious creature that stalks it, and Drood was a thriller concerning Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens. Both were distinctly British. Then came the last thing I expected: a Western. But Black Hills is really only part Western, with a twist. The opening is instantly engaging. As Paha Sapa, an 11-year-old Lakota whose name means "Black Hills" (a rare event as Lakota are almost never named after sacred locations), "counts coup" on the dying George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of Little Bighorn in the summer of 1876, the ghost of the infamous commander invades the young Sioux.
Almost instantly, his head is soon filled by Custer's remembrances of his sexual dalliances with his beloved wife Libby. Custer's spirit fills Paha Sapa's nights with recitations (in the unfamiliar language of the whites) of all his memories. (If you ever wanted to hear a poetic play-by-play of Custer's dalliances with his wife, this is the book for you.) Paha Sapa will hear Custer's voice in his head for most of the rest of his life.
Black Hills jumps around in Paha Sapa's life, covering his name-change to Billy Slow Horse and Billy Slovak, his courtship with the beautiful Rain, his strife to solely destroy the three faces on Mount Rushmore before the fourth can be placed, his time in Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, and so many other events that they begin to run together.
Simmons is so interested in giving the listener the full scope of Paha Sapa's life that his writing sometimes gets in the way of his storytelling — much as his need to present all the facts often supersedes the development of his fiction. But in combining the two — in creating a wholly believable world wherein the grounded, the spiritual, and the made-up coexist seamlessly — Simmons produces in Black Hills a shining example of what historical fiction can achieve when approached with verisimilitude.
