Until a new beach side development sets him free.īrass isn't an evil guy, he just doesn't see any value in human life. Immortal, he's been pinned to the ocean floor for centuries. In between, you know, gruesome killings.īrass is a shapeshifting trickster from Native American folklore. He doesn’t go out-of-control “Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time” with the fish-out-of-water scenario, but does get some solid laughs out of Brass’s attempts to adapt to modern American life. There’s some fun humor in Conley’s writing. Sympathetic cops and other authority figures chase after Brass, who leaves a trail of pretty obvious clues. This subplot falls away by the ending, but there’s a pretty good final showdown just the same. And women, too-he picks up a teenage hitchhiker, and herein lie the most interesting parts of the story. Once removed, of course, Brass escapes and hits the road, murdering anyone who attempts to disuade him from getting to Las Vegas and doing some serious gambling. First thing that’s gotta go is that weird, wooden pole.

Unfortunately the site of his burial is also where a small California town is looking to do a beach revamping. This being, the one-named Brass, has been pinioned to the ocean floor, guarded over by crows, for hundreds of years. It won’t change the way you think about the genre, but if you like shape-shifting monsters, Native American legends, and the thought of a pack of police trying to chase down a centuries-old creature, then here you go. Conley, is one hell of a fast-moving book. Mankiller, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, has contributed a foreword.“Brass,” by Robert J. Powerful, often dealing with cruel events, yet imbued with a mystical aura, these stories reflect the range of Cherokee culture and the differences among the full and mixed-blood inheritors. Cherokee history forms the basis of others, notably in ``Yellow Bird: An Imaginary Autobiography,'' an extended variation on the Genesis story, and ``The Night George Wolfe Died,'' a bitter telling of Indian-white relationship. In the title story an entire family, one by one, succumbs to the power of the tsigli. In ``The Endless Dark of the Night,'' a contemporary couple attempts to deprecate an old superstition``They say that whenever you see a fox that somebody's gonna die''but their uneasiness is troubling.

A Cherokee cop (``Badger'') who fears an ``old hoot owl hanging around my house,'' takes a bullet to an Indian witch doctor for a special incantation. Many of the stories revolve around the tsigli, usually a witch whose evil capabilities may be presaged by visits from owls, hawks or foxes. The oral storytelling heritage of the Cherokee nation, with its emphasis on the spirit life as everyday reality, is the source for this collection by Conley, a Cherokee Indian and a leader in the indigenous literature movement.

Cherokee by Robert J. Conley