Synopsis
When George Miller is killed in the mines of Yellow Hill, his wife and children are left to try and piece their lives back together. Tabitha Miller, George’s widow, is thrown into deeper chaos when she discovers that George’s death had nothing to do with the cave’s collapse, but was caused by some terrible predator deep within the earth. His death covered up by the mine’s Proprietor-Jeremiah Hart.
In nearby Big Spring, freed slave-turned-occult bounty hunter Gilbert Ptolemy arrives with his adopted son in search of a murderous vampire. New revelations in Yellow Hill draw the duo toward the struggling Miller family, the strange mine, and the horrors lurking within.
The Miller and Ptolemy families are pitted against mundane and supernatural forces in this Weird West adventure. Family struggles, heart-stopping gunfights, and nightmare creatures from dark realms abound in this award-winning novel from C.S. Humble.
Review
Historical horror is a fun genre to play around in. Whether it be a knight and a girl traversing black plague & demon riddled France, The Donner Party running from ravenous wolf-like spirits, or a Blackfeet vampire telling his incredible life story, it’s a subgenre with literal thousands of years’ worth of untapped events, stories, and just vibes to get excited about! One section of this subgenre is Weird West, which is typically either set in the Old West of the American frontier (think A Fistful of Dollars but with monsters & magic), or it’s set in a Wild West style secondary world (Cold West by Clayton Snyder is an example). It also happens to be one of many subgenres incorporated into my favourite series of all time, The Dark Tower by Stephen King.
So, when I heard about The Massacre at Yellow Hill by C.S. Humble, the first book of the That Light Sublime trilogy and book one overall of the wider Amid The Vastness of All Else saga, I was immediately grabbed. Originally self-published before being re-released by Shortwave Publishing recently, this is a weird west story following the Miller family in the aftermath of the death of the father of the family, alongside Ptolemy & Carson, a free black man, and his adopted white son, as they hunt down bounties of the supernatural kind.
This book already had an advantage of being right up my alley because it had been comped to The Dark Tower, and historical horror is something I just enjoy regardless. I wasn’t expecting, however, to be greeted immediately by some incredible character work, a gripping story that I literally couldn’t put down (I read this book in two extended sprints), and a rich world set against the aftermath of the American Civil War & the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln, with a deep mythos that we barely scratch the surface of in this instalment.
One thing that strikes me about The Massacre at Yellow Hill is how realised the characters are. When I am reading a characters dialogue, or from that characters POV, I think Humble could have removed any dialogue tags or names and I’d know who we are following at that moment. Tabitha Miller is a strong-willed mother and one of the best female Western characters I’ve experienced since Sadie Adler from Red Dead Redemption 2. Ptolemy & Carson are a brilliant duo to follow, and their action scenes are so cinematic and visually exciting, but I’m so connected to what happens to them that every injury, scrape, bite and graze they receive is truly wounding to my heart. Carson’s coming of age arc is up there the best I’ve read (and I’ve read a lot of coming of age) and Ptolemy’s almost Gandalf like demeanour makes him incredibly endearing. Not only this, but Humble’s approach to side characters and minor POV’s is the same way that King or Abercrombie do it, i.e. he identifies a quirk or voice for this character and simply lets you sink into it.
The story itself is very well paced, and for less than 300 pages, it also fits a lot into it. Humble hints at a larger world but never loses sight of the human scale that this story does so well to stay on. He hints at a world with scheming cults, secret societies, vampire courts, cosmic beings, and eldritch magic. But Humble nails the feeling of the frontier West, especially the Wild towns of West Texas, with its dusty streets and sense of untapped ambition. It’s an immersive setting, and the allusions that Humble makes to a grander scale is something I can’t wait to explore in book 2!
In short, The Massacre at Yellow Hill is the first part of an epic journey, akin to Michael McDowell’s Blackwater. It feels like the end of the first arc for a wider story, and the sequel promises more. This is how you do big historical horror action-adventure thrillers. If book one is anything to go by, then Amid The Vastness of All Else deserves huge success. This book is the kind of thrilling, action-packed, character focused story that I would love to write myself one day! I aspire to achieve even the fraction of the greatness this single book hits!
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