Alec and the Black discover a mysterious white mare in the Florida Everglades

Okay, so remember how we all thought that aliens going to Azul Island was weird?

That book was a model of internal logic and sensible plotting compared to this one.

Also, remember how I complained that The Black Stallion Challenged didn’t have much plot? It’s like Walter Farley heard that and said “Hold my beer.”

Here is what happens in this book: Alec and the Black get lost in the Everglades overnight and encounter a weird dude and his mare. That’s it. THAT’S IT. REALLY.

But oh, holy crap, the insanity that happens in those swamps…!

We start the book at a circus performance in Stockholm, where a gray mare performs a liberty act, taking her cues from some very weird music. She runs through the haute ecole movements (like the Spanish Riding School), piaffes and passages, and generally puts on what sounds like a really impressive freestyle without a rider or anyone on the ground directing her.

Hanging out in the wings is her owner/trainer, who is introduced as Captain Philippe de Pluminel. He trained at the Cadre Noir in France and he’s black – of Haitian ancestry – and 99.9% of what Walter Farley writes about him is vaguely-to-explicitly racist. It’s…not great.

He believed strongly in the powers of the small figurine, for his Haitian blood and heritage had made him more superstitious than most men.

Pluminel is grumpy that people don’t appreciate his mare the way he thinks they should, and then his mind sort of wanders down lots of paths including thinking that she dances so well because “it was the woman in her,” uggggggghhhhh.

He wanted her to have a foal and he had found the stallion that was right for her in every way. He had seen him on Swedish television only that week, a horse called the Black, the American champion, winning a great race in Florida. That he should find such a stallion now, after so many years of searching, was still another sign that pointed the way for him.

No one’s breeding decisions in these books make ANY SENSE. You have a very nice dressage mare and after years of searching you’re going to breed her to a racehorse of unknown pedigree that you saw on TV once? A RACEHORSE? WHY.

Speaking of the Black, he is on a vacation at a ranch in Florida and someone turned him out in a field next to a field of mares and we devote an uncomfortably long time to his case of blue balls.

Within his great body was a fierce, insistent, almost intolerable longing for a mate.

Ew.

We get a couple of pages of Alec sort of wishing he didn’t have so many responsibilities, that it could just be him and his horse, and you know what, Alec? WHAT RESPONSIBILITIES? Again, I hate to keep bringing this up, but he has ONE horse. One. That he races only occasionally. Then they take long vacations together. THAT SOUNDS PRETTY GREAT, ALEC. He hasn’t even been back to Hopeful Farm in like a year!

Alec jumps up on the Black bareback to do a bit of a training ride, and ends up following a path into the Everglades because he feels called to. He just jaunts down this trail that he’s never been on before, with no idea where it leads, and he keeps thinking “hm, maybe I should turn back, the swamp is dangerous, nah, I really feel like something is calling me to keep going.”

They seriously pass an alligator corpse being picked clean by carrion birds and at no point does it occur to Alec that something out there killed an alligator and maybe it’s not safe???

The winding dark water was like a slithering snake, but it was shallow enough to ford without swimming. There was no sign of any alligators and it would only take a few seconds to cross.

Oh good as long as there’s no sign of alligators ALEC THEY LIVE UNDERWATER YOU IDIOT.

Anyway, they ride for-fucking-ever along this path, seriously like two chapters of “this is a creepy swamp, oh well, I’ll just keep going” with occasional asides into 1969-era debates about draining the Everglades so they can build housing developments and whether they’ll ever think about the environment. (Spoiler alert: no, they will not, Florida is objectively the worst state, GO AHEAD, COME AT ME.)

They come across Pluminel riding his mare, The Ghost, in a random clearing at the end of this path and they’ve been cantering this whole time, for hours and hours, so they could be easily 20 miles away.

Alec clamped a hand across his horse’s nostrils, stilling the neigh that was about come. “No,” he said softly.

So Pluminel is putting on some kind of freestyle exhibition in the middle of the swamp and I have so many questions. Is this just his daily schooling? Did he time this somehow so that they were showing off right as Alec and the Black arrived? WHY?

The man was part of his horse as she moved at full speed while fixed to one spot.

From context clues, that’s supposed to be a canter pirouette.

And now we’re introduced to a central theme of the rest of the book: Alec cold-cocking the Black.

Alec remained where he was, mindful again of Henry’s final instructions. “Above anything else, keep him away from mares.”

The whole horse-sex subplot of this book is squicky, creepy, and weirdly handled. Walter Farley clearly knows jack shit about horse breeding (both the planning and the physicality, and I’m sorry to say more on that later) but has this weird toxic masculinity over-identification with stallions in general and the Black in particular. Bits of that have come through in other books but in this one it’s full on “I AM MALE AND I MUST FUCK.” That’s it. That’s all we get from the Black in this book.

Pluminel is weird from the get-go.

[His] eyes were inquisitive, as well they should be at finding someone watching his performance. But there was also a coldness in them that foreboded danger. There was no getting away now. [Alec] had to face up to this meeting.

For the next, I dunno, three chapters the following things happen over and over and over and over again:

• Alec thinks about how he really shouldn’t be here and this dude is kind of creepy and he’s in the middle of nowhere and all signs point to his impending murder.
• Pluminel shows him some pictures of horses or says something marginally interesting about training horses and Alec decides he’s the smartest and coolest.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

The captain was a professional horseman like himself and, according to the blurb on the jacket of the book, was the world’s foremost authority on dressage. Never in his life had Alec failed to get along with someone who loved horses.

Oh, Alec, you haven’t met enough horse people.

(In all seriousness though Alec meets people who love horses but who he does not get along with IN EVERY SINGLE BOOK. Including people who try to murder him!)

I’m going to skip a whole lot of “but maybe I should go home? oooooh, he’s got cool pictures of horses!” because ugh it goes on FOREVER.

They have a gourmet meal together:

There were many kinds of canned meat as well as fresh fruit, and Alec suddenly realized how hungry he was.

I unapologetically love Spam, I would totally be down for a Spam buffet with some fresh fruit on the side, but so much for portraying this guy as some kind of urbane wit with great taste.

Pluminel tells Alec a long story full of foreshadowing and mild hysterics that boils down to this: he is descended from a Native American (“Carib Indian” ugh) who guided the conquistadors through the Everglades in trade for a horse, and a local deity named Kovi has placed a curse on his entire family. Every time they interact with a horse, bad shit happens to them. This is relayed in a “of course this is absolutely true” kind of way and Pluminel sort of kind of has a nervous breakdown while telling Alec the story but despite constantly thinking he should run for the hills, Alec does not do so.

A storm comes, except with just lightning, no rain.

“I’m afraid of lightning because I’ve seen too many animals killed in pasture by it,  and my horse and I have had some terrible experiences in storms.”

Alec implying that he has seen multiple horses struck by lightning in the pasture is BONKERS.

Well, during the storm he runs out to the Black (who is hanging out in a random shed) and it’s not entirely clear what happens but basically the shed is destroyed and Alec has to move the Black into the main barn with the Ghost.

Alec then goes to bed. Like you do, when you’re in a strange crazy man’s house. He has either a dream or a psychic experience in which he feels like something is holding him down in to the bed and smothering him. He wakes up and there’s nothing but he gets up and goes out into the night to find, predictably enough, that Pluminel is trying to breed the Black to the Ghost.

Alec stopped at the barn. The horses were behind it and not far away. At first he was aware only of the beauty of the blending of their bodies, coal-black and silver-gray.

Farley devotes waaaaaaay too much time to describing how the Black keeps trying to mount the Ghost, and how Pluminel doesn’t think the Black is treating her right because he’s trying to bite her withers which is…pretty normal?

Repeatedly [Pluminel] pulled down the shank with all his strength. The Black went back on his haunches in an attempt to escape the pain of the chain cutting viciously into his gums. “Assez! Ca suffit! Enough!” the captain screamed at the stallion while backing him with terrible force. “You are a devil! You do not treat her this way! You go forward when I say you do, not before!”

And Alec…doesn’t really do anything? He just watches? It makes NO SENSE.

He stood in the doorway where he could see the stallion whirling his mare around, dominating her, bringing her to her knees, until, finally, she stood quietly before him.

So much squick in this scene, be glad I am only excerpting it for you.

Finally Alec steps in and Pluminel turns on him and hits him. Alec stays conscious long enough to see the Black run away. He wakes up some indefinite period of time later and Pluminel tells him the Black is gone, so of course Alec sets out into the swamp in the pitch black. It’s actually not as crazy as you might think compared to staying with the lunatic who just tried to kill him.

Alec wanders the swamp for a while (possibly hours?) until he comes across Pluminel, who has come out to help him. Pluminel tells him that they should go to a particular island in the swamp that’s an Indian burial ground because that’s where all the dry stream beds lead so that’s where the Black will go like that makes sense???

They sort of hang out on this island and then shit starts to get really weird.

Basically they both have psychic breaks. Pluminel runs off, and Alec stays on the island and we get page after page after PAGE of stuff like this:

His mind could no longer think in terms of what was real and unreal. There was only quick and final acceptance of the fact that somehow he had bridged two worlds, one of dense matter in which he lived and a psychic world which nobody else knew.

what.

Feelings he could not describe came to him from all directions, flowing, descending, penetrating his very being until they became a single physical sensation, that of a fierce dark wind blowing on him, through him, reaching into his very soul. There was no longer any crimson light, just darkness.

Alec, no.

This goes on and on and on but then Alec snaps out of it to find the Black. He comes across Pluminel, whose face has been caved in and decides that basically Pluminel was murdered by Kovi. Yeah.

Alec emerges from the swamp to find out that everyone has been worried about him and also that no one believes his story about Pluminel and Kovi. Frankly, they gaslight the shit out of Alec, which is unfortunate.

For several days afterward, he had been kept quiet by drugs. He held no bitterness toward Joe Early and the others, knowing it had been for the best.

oh HELL no.

Henry is in on the gaslighting too. There’s a totally perfunctory race scene back in New York – the Black wins, of course – that’s mostly filled with Henry thinking about how Alec has changed in some indefinable way. It’s ok, though, it hasn’t affected his riding.

Alec had made no mistakes in the race today because his instincts, not his mind, governed his riding.

sigh.

Remember my theory about how the whole series makes infinite more sense if you imagine that Alec is suffering from PTSD throughout it? Yeah. Basically that comes roaring back in this book.

Henry is at least trying, though. He takes Alec to the circus because he saw a poster for the Ghost – though he at least half-believes it’ll be fake, or not the same horse, or pretty much anything that proves Alec was lying or making up his experiences.

It’s the same mare, though. They watch her same freestyle performance, complete with weird horrible music.

A strange feeling swept over Henry. He felt that somehow he was descending into a deep void, and he didn’t like it.

Why does anyone go to this show???

Afterwards, they go backstage and Alec buys the Ghost for $30,000, which, adjusted for inflation from 1969 to 2018, is $212,000. Holy shit. Can I just once again remind everyone that less than a year ago they were so broke they had to bring the Black back to racing just to rebuild their barn?

“She’s in foal to the Black, so how could I let her get away from us?”

That’s his reason. One rendezvous with the Black and she’s in foal. And also they need to own all the Black’s offspring, for…reasons? (Except for Bonfire, I guess.)

Aaaaaaand…the end.

Well? Most insane one yet, or do you still think aliens at Azul Island holds top honors? Does it make sense to you that the world’s foremost expert on dressage lures the Black to the swamp to breed his mare, and then goes insane? (I mean, really, couldn’t he just have waited a few months and paid a stud fee like everyone else?)

 

 

(as a very quick note: I made the executive decision to skip Man O’War, which technically for some reason goes in between The Black Stallion and Flame and this book.)

Alec and the Black face off against Steve and Flame on the racetrack.

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: this book is really thin on the ground in terms of plot. Basically the entire book is Alec hanging around Hialeah talking and thinking about being a jockey and lecturing Steve and then there’s the race. That’s it. That’s all that happens.

That doesn’t mean the filler stuff isn’t weird and nuts, though, so let’s do this.

You may or may not remember from the last book that the Black headed home from Europe with a stone bruise, and that bruise bothered him according to the dictates of plot through The Black Stallion and Flame. Well, we start this book off with Alec and Henry fussing over that same stone bruise.

“What are you looking for, Henry?” he asked.

“The X-ray plates Doc Palmer took,” the trainer said.

“The latest batch?” Alec asked.

You guys, I am like the poster child for neurotic obsessiveness about my horse’s medical care and fuck if I am ever going to get multiple x-rays of a goddamn stone bruise.

“We’ll just keep giving him long, slow works for the time being. If he continues to go well, as we hope he will, and his condition is as good as it should be, we’ll race. Otherwise, he’ll stay in the barn and we’ll have a nice quiet winter ini sunny Florida. As you said before, that’s not too bad.”

Can we line up a few facts here?

1. They don’t have any other horses racing. Just the Black.
2. Two books ago, they were so flat broke they brought the Black back to racing (supposedly temporarily?) to earn enough money to race a barn.
3. They own a farm in New York. Where they can just turn the horse out to pasture if they really insist on him sitting around doing nothing.

Keeping the Black at the track in Florida, away from the entire rest of their business, is simultaneously the dumbest and most expensive way to spend a winter.

As the veterinarian had said, “I don’t mean the Black is just racing sound, Alec. He’s completely sound.”

???????????????

So while they’re sitting around angsting about the Black, Alec reads some fan mail, and one letter happens to be from a guy named Steve Duncan. Remember him? Well, he writes Alec a letter and then comes to see him at the barn.

And you guys, Steve got weird since the last time we saw him. By weird, I mean he became a huge asshole.

“It takes a long time to become a race-rider,” Alec said.

“Not in my case,” Steve answered.

Seriously, though, a HUGE asshole. He’s pushy and rude and smug to Alec even in a situation when he’s the one asking for help and advice.

Steve laughed. “I don’t think there’s much difference in riders,” he said, “even race-riders. Get on the best horse and you’re the best rider. It’s as simple as that.”

“It isn’t,” Alec said.

Despite all of this, Alec gives him advice: get Flame to a couple of races in the Bahamas, get him a record, and then bring him to the states.

We’re missing a huuuuuuuuge backstory here. Since when did Steve want to race Flame? His last experience with that was a huge trainwreck. How did he get Flame off the island? WHY did he get Flame off the island? What the hell happened to make him such a jerk? What is even going on here?

Anyway, Steve flounces off, and Alec gets on with his life.

Alec washed up and then went to the track kitchen for a cup of coffee. He didn’t linger over it or spend any time with the other men who were there, for he had a lot of work to do before Henry arrived….

After finishing his work in the stall Alec began grooming the Black. No one else could do this job, not even Henry. It made for a long day but there was no alternative.

YOU HAVE ONE HORSE ALEC. How long does mucking one stall and grooming one horse take???

Anyway, the next, like, three chapters are Alec and Henry scoping out other jockeys and other horses and it’s insanely boring. Basically Alec gets shat on by Henry constantly because Henry doesn’t think he’s focusing enough.

I’ll address the elephant in the room now because it’s going to be the theme of the rest of the book. Alec has ridden exactly three horses in races. In chronological order, that’s the Black, Satan, and Black Minx. That’s it. We have a pretty comprehensive view of Alec’s entire life through this series of books, and those are the only three horses he ever rides. But in this book he’s supposed to be this tough, experienced, smart jockey. Everyone looks up to him as a great rider, really talented, really hardworking, who knows his stuff. THREE HORSES. THREE. It makes NO sense. None. It’s a ridiculous attempt by Walter Farley to inject a whole lot of magical thinking into the plot.

Anyway, speaking of magical thinking, the Black is a turf horse now.

“Take the Black over the grass course this morning.”

Sure why not there’s no difference at all between racing surfaces you just go and do that.

More grumping, more railbirding, and then there’s this totally and utterly insane sequence when there’s a race during a huge thunderstorm.

A bolt of lightning split the sky, and Alec was able to distinguish the silks of the riders as their mounts reared in the starting stalls. “I still think the starter ought to hold them off,” Alec said.

Ya think?

A filly in the race is injured, and it makes Alec worry about the Black all over again, and he ruminates on the Black’s injury (which…now seems to have been an abscess? maybe with some foreign debris? it’s wholly unclear.) and somehow that gives him a really terrible idea.

“Come on,” he said, “We ought to watch the operation on [the filly].”

“Why?” [Henry] asked uneasily.

“It’s something we should know about,” Alec said. “Part of our job, like you’re always telling me.”

How is watching leg surgery part of your job? How? Anyway, it freaks Henry right the hell out because he’s having his own medical anxiety.

During the operation, Alec starts quizzing the vets and there’s like a whole crowd and it’s this super weird and chummy boys’ club where they all hang out while the vet pieces back together this poor filly’s leg and it’s just super weird, you guys. My best guess is that Walter Farley did a bunch of research and didn’t want to waste it so he wrote this scene.

There’s a weird bit where Alec goes on TV with a bunch of other jockeys and they answer awkward questions together. There’s a real attempt to paint out the personalities of the other jockeys: one’s a talented kid, one’s in it for the money, one’s a hardened veteran who loves it and will never retire, etc. Honestly it’s all kind of boring. I wish I cared, because it could be a really cool angle, but I just don’t.

Well, except for this bit.

Pete Edge sat alongside Jay, his short legs crossed. He was built square and was strong enough to drag the carcass of a dead horse out of his stall, which Alec had seen him do.

WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCK?!?!?

Weird interview over, it’s time for Steve and Flame to arrive. And he makes an impression – Alec and Henry both freak out about how much he looks like the Black. But Alec still wants to help Steve out.

“Will you be working the Black tomorrow? I mean…if you are, do you think you could work him with us?”

“Together? The Black and Flame?”

“Yes. You see…what I mean is that it would impress the track officials more than if I worked Flame alone. They’d see the kind of horse he is when he could stay with the Black.”

This is an absolutely terrible idea, so naturally Alec is fine with it.

Predictably, it goes very badly.

He knew too that neither he nor Steve were any longer a part of this race. They were only witnesses to a savage battle that had been going on since the beginning of time. What would have been natural combat between two competing stallions had given way to the strongest instinct of all – flight! They would not stop until they had run themselves into the ground.

Yeah, really badly.

The two stallions staggered as they approached the tunnel beneath the stands, and rocked on the springs of their legs, one tired foot following another. The interplay of muscle was there for all to see but so was the immense fatigue. Every movement appeared torturous.

Alec realizes that Steve intended to provoke the Black and yet still defends him to Henry.

Steve enters Flame into a race and it’s…nothing like the race from The Island Stallion Races. Remember how Steve basically targeted Flame at horses up front? Yeah, no, Flame is perfectly happy to just run along and let Steve guide him around the track. He wins, of course, which makes Steve even more of an insufferable asshole than he was.

Steve shrugged his shoulders and stood up. “I know you mean well, Alec, but you never rode a horse like Flame.”

“I know the kind of horse you’re talking about,” Alec said quietly. “But let’s leave it your way.”

So, the day comes, and the Black and Flame are entered into the same big race. It’s kind of anticlimactic? I dunno. Just kind of boring as far as races go in these books.

The Black wins, of course, in a photo finish by a sliver of a nose. And Alec’s first thought is to go find Steve.

He felt that the activities about to take place in the winner’s circle were not as important as his talking to Steve Duncan as soon as possible. For Steve, the apprentice rider, had been beaten to a greater extent than his horse.

Alec behaves through this whole book as if he and Steve are in some kind of weird abusive relationship. Steve is a complete asshole, and Alec keeps going out of his way to help him and be nice to him.

Steve recovers a little bit at the very end and realizes that Alec’s been trying to be nice with him the whole time. They have a nice little exchange about why Steve wanted the money from racing – he’s trying to buy Azul Island – and then…the book ends.

So, yeah. Just weirdly anticlimactic punctuated by total insanity. One of the more low key Black Stallion books.

What do you think? Was this totally wasted? Did the aliens transplant Steve’s personality? What the hell kind of jockey hauls a horse carcass out of a stall???