The Sheriff of Purgatory

I have this vivid memory of me as a young kid proudly showing my father my latest library book. I seem to recall an orange-filtered cover of a lone figure on a desert horizon. The title had something to do with “Purgatory,” and it was a science fiction novel set in an American post-apocalyptic wasteland.

That’s all. Don’t remember any characters, scenes, or even the plot itself.

After a bit of right-brain thought and some googling, I’ve been able to track down that book. It’s called The Sheriff of Purgatory and it’s by a writer named Jim Morris. A library a few towns over still had a copy, so I picked it up and read through it in about five hours over four days.

Immediately I realized what happened those thirty-plus years ago. I think my father, hiding his horror, quickly and quietly returned the book before I could crack it open.

Published in 1979, the tale takes place in the year 1996 within a crumbling America. Not much is said about what happened – ’cept that we lost a war in the Middle East – and not much is said about what is happening. It’s now a very dangerous world out there, out at our doorsteps. The union may be dissolved. Society has reverted to feudal, local-based economies. The cities are filled with cannibals and run by warring gangs. Infrastructure has fallen apart (there’s a great image of the collapsed George Washington Bridge). The Mafia is making a serious power play against an ineffective government. Its weak armed forces are a running joke throughout the novel.

This is all vague background, though, not really the focus of the novel. What is is Frank Spurlock, our titular sheriff. Known as Spurlock to his friends as well as enemies, he’s quite the unusual figure, and it took me to nearly the book’s end before I could define him. He’s a New Age action figure. He’s one-third David Carradine’s grasshopper, one-third that lawman from Walking Tall, and one-third Tommy Chong.

That last part is the reason my dad ran stoplights returning that library book.

Spurlock is the sheriff of Purgatory County, Arkansas, one of the last bastions of sanity in a world falling apart. Aside from successfully keeping the peace in his post-apocalyptic corner of the world, Spurlock enjoys naked yoga, transcendental meditation, living on a hippie farming commune, and continuously smoking pounds and pounds of his own awesome home-grown pot.

Despite what you may think, I enjoyed the story. I started off hesitantly, had an internal subconscious debate over whether to invest the coupla hours into it, and by the end I was won over. Crazy.

We begin with a good ol’ showdown in Purgatory County, Arkansas, between sheriff Spurlock and a Mafia chieftain. Our plucky sheriff then gets the urge to visit his two kids he hasn’t seen in a decade. They’re living with his ex in New York City, hell-on-earth on this earthly hell. And so he and “his lady” pack a VW van with weed, guns, food and sleeping bags and set off on a cross-country trip, meeting all sorts of colorful folks and skirting death in every chapter.

A lot of the appeal, I guess, comes once you accept Spurlock. Yeah, he’s a super-hippie, a genuine product of his time, and it’s only in retrospect that we see him for the embarrassing and extinct dinosaur he is. In 1979, I’m sure a lot of readers nodded thoughtfully, and a small percentage even said, “You know what? I should start meditating!” (In fact, I say that on a weekly basis.)

I also liked that Spurlock’s mission to New York doesn’t quite turn out the way I thought it would. Big plot thingies like that are always a plus.

So even though I felt the excessive recreational drug use silly and stupid, even though the glorification of the 60s music scene made me gag, and even though the bad 70s lingo (“balling” “babe” “freaking” “my lady”) was sprinkled way too frequently through the prose, I liked it. I was able to read past that and enjoy the story. I give The Sheriff of Purgatory a solid B.