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Synopsis
Imprisoned and tortured, Town Marshall Elias Faust is made to recount a series of vignettes around how he became entwined with a well of power. Faust recalls his marshalling of a small town against the threat of an evil warlock and his army of sand shades, otherworldly beings and shootouts with bandits in this violent weird western.
Review
Hums the Magnificent Seven theme. Saddle up, pardner and grab your Colts. Rance D. Denton is in town and this mean suna’bitch outlaw is bringing violence. Not in my town. His Ragged Company is a tale straight outta the weird west and it’s a ride.
The premise is pretty simple actually. A mean town marshall in Elias Faust has to dig deep to keep the law in a lawless frontier town. HRC duly throws all manner of weirdness at the guy but he stubbornly refuses to die each and every time. Things really take a turn for Faust when he guns down Billy Gregden, a no-good outlaw. Before he dies, Gregden evokes a powerful magic that sets Faust on the road to some serious arcane fuckery.
See, Billy Gregden is part of the Gregden gang, and they’re led by a sadistic warlock who goes by the name Magnate. Magnate Gregden gets plenty time to show what a power-hungry bastard he really is, one that will nonchalantly treat his sons as meat shields from one moment to a vengeful father the next. When you have a bad guy with a mean streak like this it makes his hubris all the sweeter.
This is all where Denton’s book simply works. The character work is sublime. Faust’s testimonies are gritty and gruesome. The people we meet in this story all bring their various flaws and imperfections to make this a prairie page-turner. This book gives everything you’d expect from a land where magic and the wild west collide. Faust himself is a great lead, he doesn’t excel at anything other than to be real stubborn and quicker in a shootout than a lot of the outlaws he faces down.
Denton’s turns of phrase had me rolling throughout. Whether it’s the monologuing Magnate or someone telling Faust to go fuck himself (the audiobook, incidentally, is great), the writing consistently strikes true. One of the best examples is in the following clip:
“If girls falling from the sky were the start of the sentence and drunken miners with vendettas the period, I was the dumbass comma crushed in between.”
*Chef’s Kiss*
Once Upon a Time in the Weird West
I keep telling you about books you shouldn’t give to Grandma. Yeah, this is one of those you really don’t give to Grandma. You know there’s some real sickly moments thrown into the mixer for good measure. Brain worms, blood and guts, extremely graphic dismemberment; the author’s social media handle of “Violence Obscene” ain’t for nuthin’. But HRC gives us the chance to splatter and swear our way through a kooky western with all the obscene violence of a Tarantino flick. Seriously, what’s not to like about that?
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