Reseñas Varias sobre este libro
Westerns and weird fantasy/horror mashed together? Yes please.1 Marlene3,087 221
I dont normally start by talking about the authors or in this case the editors Foreword. In fact, I very seldom read the Foreword because Im too interested in getting to the actual story or in this case stories to take the time. And theyre generally not all that fascinating. But I read this one and got hit with a sense of nostalgia so strong that I cant resist mentioning it here. Because the editor and I grew up with those same Westerns on TV pretty much all the time in our childhood, and because we both emerged with the same favorite, The Wild, Wild West.
Not that awful 1999 movie. I mean and the author meant the one, the only, the original TV series with Robert Conrad and Ross Martin. I still remember, and can hear Ross Martins voice in my head, talking mostly to himself, as he often did, as he was whipping up the spécialité de la maison of the Hotel Desperation! to get them out of whatever fix theyd gotten themselves into in that act of the four acts that made up each weekly episode. Its a VERY fond memory.
So, if you have that same fondness for Westerns especially those that touched on, or were touched by, or dipped their whole entire six-shooters into the very, very weird, or if youre a fan of more recently published Weird West inspired stories such as Charlaine Harris Gunnie Rose series and Laura Anne Gilmans Huntsmen, or if you just plain love it when the things that go bump in the night are armed with fangs, claws AND six-shooters, this collection might just be your jam.
It certainly was mine. It was mine so much, in fact, that this is one of the rare occasions when Ive rated each story in the collection individually, so that you can get the full-bodied flavor complete with actual bodies, for each and every one.
The Disobedient Devil Dust-up at Copper Junction by Cullen Bunn
Mad scientist meets even madder gremlins as Professor Dimitri Daedalus and his Navajo partner Yiske arrive in remote Copper Junction Utah, summoned by the Professors old mentor to be his next sacrifices to the gremlins tearing up every single human tool in town with applied chaos and malice, only to end in fiery glory sailing off a cliff. Good fun. B
Devils Snare (Golgotha #1.5) by R.S. Belcher
In spite of being part of a series, this story stands quite well alone. Love-lorn scientist/engineer Clay Turlough, who combines bits of both Dr. Frankenstein AND his monster, gets dragged out of his latest attempt to save his ladylove by a more strictly medical case of a poisoned boy, his widowed mother, and the man who is a bit too invested in both. A-
Bad by Josh Malerman
Borderline horror about two idiots who think they can rob the most secure bank on The Trail by pretending to be one of the banks regular depositors. A pretense they intend to enact by literally stealing the mans face. A hard read because the murdering bank robber wannabes are really, really TSTL to the point where the story is just blood, guts and idiocy. D
Bigfoot George by Greg Cox
Gold fever grips a gang of humans claiming a strike in Bigfoot country. The ringleaders think they can treat sasquatch the way they treat their fellow humans only one of those fellow humans isnt to both the humans and the sasquatch detriment. The humans are nasty in ways that are all too familiar, but the heel-turn of their not-so-human companion is epic enough to nearly redeem their mess if not them. C+
Story of the Century by C. Edward Sellner
A tale of angels and demons, vampires and newspaper reporters. A reporter with a nose for news follows a bounty hunter on the trail of a demon who can wipe out whole towns in a single breath, only to find herself the last witness to an epic confrontation between celestial and demonic forces that wakes a legacy she had no idea she possessed. B
The Stacked Deck by Aaron Rosenberg
A card sharp with a magic touch wins his way onto a gamblers paradise of a riverboat cruise only to learn that the stake hes playing for is his soul and the deck has been stacked by a demon who believes he holds all the cards. The weird side of the weird West with a fascinating magical system of drawing cards from the ether. Maverick would have fit right in. And won. B+
Desert Justice by Maurice Broaddus
A black man with a righteous cause, the will to back it up and the grief not to care if he goes down in the fight takes up a magical badge to battle the evil spirit of the dead Confederacy that white men are using to vilify, subjugate and lynch blacks who stand up for themselves in the west after they fled the legal slavery of the sharecropping system. If you enjoyed the authors novella Buffalo Soldier youll love this one too. I certainly did. A
In the End, the Beginning by Laura Anne Gilman
A still heartbreaking but slightly more hopeful alternate magical version of the white mans invasion of the west. It cant be stopped, but powerful spirits CAN, if they are willing to sacrifice themselves and their magic in the cause, alter the means by which it happens, in the hopes that the ones who cant be stopped are the best of their kind and not the worst. A
Nightfall on the Iron Dragon Line by James A. Moore
The inevitable train story because no western or weird version thereof would be complete without one train story. The concept is interesting, and a story about a lawman bringing in a dangerous criminal always works in westerns but this one needed to be longer for all the disparate elements especially the worm and the Chinese engineers to come together. C
Simple Silas by Scott Sigler
This is straight up horror and the story relies on the protagonist having an undefined intellectual disability (because they were back then) in a way that just makes the whole thing more uncomfortable than compelling. D
Hell and Destruction are Never Full by Marguerite Reed
A bounty hunter captures a man for more money than shes ever seen in her life and doesnt want to hear about the real reason the bounty was set until she comes face to face with a vampire and his renfield who plan to shut up a witness and get a meal out of it at the same time. That this has a happy ending is a big surprise. Its not the standout in the collection but it was pretty good all the same. B
The Legend of Long-Ears by Keith R.A. DeCandido
A meeting that never happened between two legends, Calamity Jane and Deputy U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves. Calamity is a seer who drinks to keep her visions of the future at bay, while she does her best to keep the chaos agent known as Long-Ears from taking more lives than hes due. She saves Reeves but cant save them all. However, she saves so many that Long-Ears himself travels the west telling any who will listen the tale of his greatest and most respected enemy. This one seems the quintessential weird west story, or at least one branch of it, with legends meeting, native spirits interfering, respect between enemies and tragedies all around. A+
The Night Caravan by Jennifer Brody
A post-apocalyptic tale where the desert has returned, while technology and fallout have bred monsters and settlements are far apart while travel puts you in danger of being ridden by one of the monsters. The mix of high tech and low villainy with a mythical utopia that is probably a boondoggle makes the story interesting. B
Dreadful by John Hartness
A middle-aged widow and a tired vampire-hunting cowboy team up to wipe out a nest of vampires that is eating their way across the west locusts. Separately, theyre victims, together they might just be enough to get the job done. And if theres an after, they might have a chance at being happy in it, together. B+
Thicker Than Water by Carrie Harris
Families are terrible. His brothers are human monsters. Her sisters are sea monsters. But family is family and blood is thicker than water, even when the deck of the ship is awash in it. This one just wasnt my cuppa, and Im trying really hard not to think about what the tea in that cuppa would be made of. C
Barnfeathers Magical Medicine Show and Tent Extravaganza by Jeffrey J. Mariotte
Another one a bit too high on the creep-o-meter for me, about a magical circus tent that steals children and eats them to keep itself and its avatar powered or perhaps the other way around, pursued by a lawman hoping to rescue children who are already gone. C
Escape Rating B: I had to do math to get to an overall rating, just as I did for the review of a previous collection by this publisher, Never Too Old to Save the World, which is going to end up on my Best Books list for this year because Ive referred to it so often.
I enjoyed this collection, well, not quite as much as Never Too Old, but still quite a bit. Even the stories that went too far into horror for my personal tastes, or the couple that just didnt work for me, still added to the overall feeling of those thrilling days of yesteryear even if it was a weirder and more uncanny yesteryear than The Lone Ranger ever imagined.
Or perhaps especially because it was a whole lot weirder and considerably more uncanny. Just as marvelously as The Wild, Wild West so often was.
Originally published at Reading Reality
Lynne317 2
Great stories. I really enjoyed them. Tony Ciak379 3
4 Stars
Because, dear, if the devil came knocking, you wouldnt let him in unless he looked a friend.
12 s DeeAnn204 4
Jaw dropping, page turner, twist after twist. Just when you thought you had it figured out
Autor del comentario:
=================================