Kathleen Kent's "The Outcasts"

Kathleen Kent is the author of The Heretic's Daughter and The Traitor's Wife. She lives in Dallas.

Here she dreamcasts an adaptation of her new novel, The Outcasts:

For Lucinda Carter, the main female character who is a young prostitute fleeing her miserable life for rumored gold on the Gulf Coast of Texas, I would cast Jena Malone (who was in Hatfield & McCoys). Jena is young, beautiful, and intelligent and I think she’d have the depth to portray a woman who would stop at nothing to make a new life for herself.

For Nate Cannon, the newly minted Texas State Policeman, I would cast someone young and athletic, un-jaded, handsome but not too “pretty,” like Chace Crawford. Nate was too young to fight in the Civil War, but he is courageous and decent, so the actor who played him could not be slick, puffed up or self-conscious in a post modernist way.

Two veteran Texas Rangers, Captain George Deering and Dr. Tom Goddard, are a very important part of the story. In past movies my favorite gentleman cowboy was always Richard Farnsworth. Sadly, he is gone so for Dr. Tom I would cast, Timothy Olyphant. I loved him in Deadwood, and he can play the romancer as well as the lawman.

Kevin Costner has become an interesting character actor, so I would cast him as Deering, Dr. Tom’s older, more seasoned partner. Deering is a complicated character in that he is of the old guard of Rangers who were judges, juries and executioners in the frontier where violence was the first course of action. The Republic of Texas after the Civil War saw sweeping changes in law and order, and Deering was not a man to fit easily into that new social order.

Learn more about the book and author at Kathleen Kent's website, blog, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

--Marshal Zeringue