TL;DR Review: Wild West-flavored fantasy. Pure chaos in the best way possible.
Synopsis:
Dango, a retired half-elf army scout, sets out with his friends to start a quiet new life on The Dark Frontier. Maybe raise some tuskers, no more fighting. But fate has other plans.
Kidnapped by savage elves Dango must fight for survival, but escape is just the beginning of his trials as he finds himself embroiled in a struggle for dominance of the territory with the vicious Gradokk Gang.
Join Dango and his friends as they fight corrupt ranchers, murderous elves, and the mountains themselves.
Welcome to gritty and visceral chases, murders, pit fights, betrayals, battles, and redemption on The Dark Frontier with this volume of The Dark Frontier Adventures – DANGO!
Full Review:
I’ve never read anything quite like Dango…and I absolutely love that!
Dango takes the scruffy, dusty, rough-and-rugged vibes of a Wild West novel and mashes it together with an adventure fantasy, producing something that is both and neither at the same time, but a blend that does something unique and immensely entertaining.
Dango is a former soldier traveling into the Dark Frontier (this world’s version of the Wild West) to find somewhere to stake a claim and build himself a home. Only he’s attacked by elves (this world’s version of hostile Native American tribes) and is forced to flee for his life. The first 20% of the book is dedicated to him barely surviving the encounter and getting beaten and broken over and over. And yet, it’s an excellent vehicle to showcase his cunning, strategic thinking, resilience, and battle smarts.
Eventually, Dango finds himself a place he’d like to call home—a patch of wilderness guarded by mountains, accessible only through a single tunnel—and calls for his former soldier friends to join him and together build a homestead where they can live a quiet life after years of war.
Unfortunately, his desires for peace are inevitably going to go up in smoke when he makes an enemy of Gradokk, a local crime boss (and all around bastard) who wants to take over all the claims in the area, including the one occupied by the friendly Kippersons who took a wounded Dango in and nursed him back to health.
In true Western fashion, it’s Dango and his small group of friends against an overwhelming number of baddies, and the resulting turmoil makes for so much entertaining reading.
The story is dark and bloody; the tone is set right from the jump, and it doesn’t shy away from killing or maiming our darlings. But it absolutely works with the Wild West flavor and makes everything a great deal of fun, because that unpredictability ensures you’re always having to keep reading to find out what bad thing is going to happen next.
The real secret weapon of Dango, though, is its characters. Dango’s a pretty classic protagonist and Gradokk an expected antagonist, but everyone else in the book—from the much-too-fast-talking Chatty to the mad-as-a-hatter Kipper, from the mute martial arts badass Dandelion to the towering Thistle and the chaotic Ting-Ting who climbs all over him—are pure chaos in the best way possible. They are the most unpredictable and surprising characters I’ve read in a long time, and this makes them so much fun to follow because you just keep up with them waiting to see what madness they’re going to pull out next.
This is not your classic fantasy and expecting anything like you’re familiar with may very well ruin your enjoyment of this book. But go into it expecting a Wild West-flavored adventure story that will never be boring, and you’ll come out the other side as entertained by this as I was!
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