Synopsis:
Catherine Coldbridge is a complicated woman: a doctor, an occultist, and briefly, a widow. In 1879, her husband, Private Frank Humble, was killed in a Sioux attack. Consumed by grief, Catherine used her formidable skills to resurrect her husband. But after the reanimation, Frank lost his soul, becoming a vicious undead monster. Unable to face her failure or its murderous consequences, Catherine fled to grieve her failure.
Twenty-five years later, Catherine has decided she must make things right. She travels back to Texas with a pair of hired killers ready to destroy Frank. But Frank is no longer a monster; he is once again the kind man she knew. He has remade himself as the Unkillable Frank Lightning, traveling with the Wild West Show, and even taking on a mysterious young ward.
Now Catherine must face a series of moral dilemmas that cannot be resolved without considerable bloodshed.
Review:
In 2023’s The Legend of Charlie Fish, Josh Rountree created a version of the Wild West that was at once naturalistic and infused with magic. In that world, centered around the historic storm that leveled the island city of Galveston, there are hard men–outlaws and heroes alike–as well as witches, child gunslingers and psychics. There’s also a lovable gill-man with a penchant for chain-smoking cigarettes as he attempts to find his way back to the sea from which he came.
All told in Rountree’s stripped down but effortlessly elegant prose and peopled with instantly lovable characters, The Legend of Charlie Fish became an instant favorite, a book I recommend to anyone who will listen.
The Unkillable Frank Lightning returns us once again to this magic-infused version of turn of the century Texas, with a lengthy detour in the Montana territory, and I couldn’t be happier if I were returning to my own childhood home.
This time around we follow Catherine Coldbridge, a medical doctor cum mad scientist, who finds herself deep in the Montana territory, attached to a military fort set squarely in Indian territory. She’s there with her new husband, a soldier named Frank Humble. When Frank is killed by native forces, Catherine calls on her extensive occult training and, in a fit of desperate grief, brings him back.
This being a Frankenstein tale, you know what happens next.
The man who comes back is not the man she loves, but instead a mindless (soulless?) monster, who uses his superhuman strength to kill everything in his path. Catherine flees this horror she has created, abandoning the newly reborn monster to the wilderness.
Fast forward twenty-five years, and Catherine has retained the services of a pair of hired killers to finally correct her error. She’s tracked Frank Humble to Texas, where she hopes to kill him so that she might peacefully drink herself into her own grave, free of this great existential guilt.
Trouble is, just like Mary Shelley’s monster, Frank has grown into his humanity. He might not be the man she once loved, but he is no feral beast. In fact, he’s taken up with a Wild West Review, reenacting an Indian attack much like the one that killed him, and he’s made a family of his fellow performers (including one familiar character from The Legend of Charlie Fish).
Things get complicated, and there’s a lot of blood spilt, a lot of hearts broken, and more than one angry mob.
The Unkillable Frank Lightning has a good deal more plot than its predecessor, but like Charlie Fish, it’s really the supporting characters that carry the story. Rountree is a deft hand at sketching in a character with a few strokes and then lettting them steal the reader’s heart.
Catherine Coldbridge, however, is harder to love, and that’s mostly due to her allegiance to type. Like that other mad doctor, she’s rash, she’s overconfident, she’s more than a little fickle, and her capacity for both self-loathing and self-pity is nearly overwhelming. While it’s Catherine’s voice that carries us through this story, and her actions that propel it toward its exciting conclusion, there seems to be less at stake for her than for the many innocents (and not-so-innocent) people that she pulls into her orbit.
This isn’t a failing of the narrative, for–after all–no one reads Frankenstein and falls in love with the doctor. No, we want the monster, and on that count, Rountree delivers.
This monster has built a life for himself at the peripheries, surrounded by a found family of outcasts and orphans, and if Rountree writes more at liberty of monsters than of the good Doctor, it’s because he’s of the monster’s party (and I think he knows it). The Unkillable Frank Lightning, much like The Legend of Charlie Fish, becomes a kind of paean to the outcast, to the monstrous, and to a land where, once upon a time, there was room enough for them find both love and acceptance.
The Unkillable Frank Lightning will release on July 15th of 2025. Preorders are available now from Tachyon Publishing.
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