Posse From Hell is a 1958 Clair Huffaker Western Deconstruction novel about a Dwindling Party Ragtag Bunch of Misfits Posse pursuing a gang of four killers and experiencing almost as much strife at the hands of the Ungrateful Townsfolk (including members of their own group) as they get from the dangerous killers they are chasing.
The book was adapted into a movie in 1961, which starred Audie Murphy (who earlier starred in the adaptation of another Huffaker book, Seven Ways from Sundown), Lee Van Cleef, John Saxon, and Vic Morrow. The film is highly faithful to the book aside from changing the protagonist's background, making his love interest a Composite Character with the Damsel in Distress, and having one posse member Spared by the Adaptation while another gets a Death by Adaptation.
Tropes in the story:
- Adaptational Angst Upgrade: Helen talking about how she feels Defiled Forever after her implied rape is original to the film. This also gives some of the less sympathetic book posse-men like Billy and Brown some Adaptational Nice Guy moments with their reactions to what she went through.
- Badass Pacifist: Young Gun Wiley is a sad variant of the trope. He is probably the best marksman and quick draw artist of the possemen and bravely charges through the face of gunfire to confront the outlaws, but he lacks the true hardness to actually kill anyone, even in self-defense. Unfortunately, he himself is unaware of this until a life-or-death situation where his inability to kill costs him his life.
- Black Dude Dies First: The very first victim of the outlaws is a Mexican saloon customer who annoyed them and got a slit throat from Leo.
- Booze-Based Buff: Cole and Kern are both exhausted and near collapse when they take a swig from Uncle Billy's canteen and discover that, instead of water, it is filled with some kind of hooch Cole describes as "over one hundred per cent proof". This gives them an energy boost that allows them to continue their pursuit of the outlaws.
- City Slicker: Seymour Kern is a tenderfoot banker, just arrived on a special assignment from the New York parent office of the bank, and who is browbeaten into joining the posse by the bank manager.
- Clothing Combat: Cole takes Kern' suit coat and tosses it over the rattlesnake that is threatening Helen. He bundles the snake up in the coat and throws it away.
- Defiled Forever: Helen believes this about herself after her Implied Rape at the hands of the outlaws, to the extent that she attempts to kill herself. Cole stops her and persuades her to keep living.
- Dwindling Party: About forty or fifty men say they will join the posse, but only twelve meet Deputy Cole at the meeting location and half of them duck out due to worrying the posse is too small. Of the seven who set out of town, five of them are killed, wounded, sent back with a wounded person, or chicken out by the climax.
- Evil Cripple: The limping outlaw nicknamed Crip leads their gang and seems to have little purpose besides unprovoked murder.
- Extremely Short Timespan: At the end of the book, Cole glances at a calendar and is incredulous the whole bloody, disillusioning affair parlayed out over just two days.
- Failure-to-Save Murder: Banner and Kern could patch up the wounds of Hate Sink outlaw Leo, but they don't want to spare the horses or the man it would divert from the posse to guard and transport him and he helped kill several of their friends, so they stand by as he bleeds out.
- Flawless Token: Johnny Caddo, the only non-white posse member, is a skilled tracker and herbalist who is perhaps the only member with purely selfless motives and, along with Kern, becomes one of the two companions Cole likes and trusts the most.
- Get Out!: After one too many insults from the three Ungrateful Townsfolk spokesmen, Banner tells them that if they haven’t gotten out of the office by the time he stands up and takes a deep breath, he is going to throw them through the window of his office no matter how tricky it is to get them between the bars of that window.
- Hypocrite: Hogan despises the townspeople who won't avenge his brother as cowards and holds himself above them despite quickly thinking of excuses to ignominiously quit the posse himself.
- Interrupted Suicide: The posse find Helen, who has been left behind. Cole tells Uncle Billy to return with her to town, but Capt. Brown's clumsy attempt to console her (the script tiptoes delicately around the fact that the outlaws have raped her) only upsets her more and she grabs a gun from her uncle and runs off to try to kill herself. Cole tackles her and takes the gun off her. Billy heads back, with Helen on a travois behind his horse.
- Lovable Coward: The reason Banner decides that I Choose to Stay in the town he now hates is that even some of the people who wouldn't join the posse still defend him against the hypocritical scorn of those who do and are willing to own up to their own failure to help him.
- Morally Bankrupt Banker: Mr. Blankenship the bank president is a sneering, profit-minded man who is too cowardly to join the posse himself but forces his City Mouse assistant Kern to risk his own life doing so by threatening to fire him. Kern himself is an aversion, as he starts out arrogant and reluctant but ends up being the most reliable of Banner's fellow posse members and refuses multiple offers to get sent back home to pass messages or get various injuries treated.
- Of Corpse He's Alive: Hogan shoots the body of a dead outlaw he falsely claims he saw Playing Possum so he has an excuse to claim he has acted to avenge his brother and can quit the diminished posse before the next dangerous fight.
- Perilous Old Fool: Captain Jeremiah Brown, a has-been ex-cavalry officer with delusions of grandeur. Capt. Brown continues to find it impossible to believe he's not in charge and demonstrates his incompetence by disobeying Cole's orders and opening fire on four men initially thought to be the outlaws. But it's four cowhands, who lost two men to the outlaws.
- Posse: Banner Cole hopes to form a posse of twenty men to chase the men who killed four people, kidnapped a woman, and robbed the bank, but only gets six volunteers, including two relatives of victims, two Glory Seekers, and a bank employee who Got Volunteered. By the midway point, four of those seven have quit, died or got sent back to their uselessness, although the last two left are dependable enough that Cole actually feels more confident despite their reduced numbers.
- So Much for Stealth: As Cole and what is left of the posse creep up on the ranch house, Hogan knocks over a box and the outlaws immediately smash the windows and start firing into the darkness at the posse.
- Token Minority: Indian blacksmith Caddo is the only notable non-white townsman, although he is also a Flawless Token with some of the most competence and least selfish motives of the posse.
- Too Good for This Sinful Earth: The five people Crip and his gang murder during their rampage through the town are all well-liked, and dependable people whose absences are felt, especially Pat's father, Marshal Webb, and Hogan's brother. The three most brave and amiable posse members besides Banner (although Wiley has some flaws) are also the three who die. Kern at least survives in the movie, but the movie also gives Uncle Billy (a fairly useless and unsympathetic guy in the book) both some deeper characterization and a Death by Adaptation.
- Ungrateful Townsfolk: Dozens of townspeople who make noise about how a posse should pursue the gang that killed four of the best-liked men themselves find excuses not to go themselves, and several of them mock and chide the man who led the posse in successfully killing the outlaws due to anger that he made them look bad and didn't recover the lost money right away.
- Young Gun: Jack Wiley is a self-trained local tough who is a master target shooter and becomes one of the few Posse volunteers in a town full of cowards due to wanting the adventure and glory of hunting and killing four infamous mass murderers. He becomes the first posse member to die after a Critical Hesitation Blunder, although, for all his bluster, Deputy Cole still ends up honoring him as one of the most decent and reliable townspeople by comparison.Kern: He was a brave man. I think he'd have been willing to fight all four of them himself.
Deputy Banner Cole: Yes, brave. But no killing instinct. These weren't tomato cans.