Posted by This is a western! I have to say I don’t come across many Weird Westerns, and it’s always nice to get something different when you read as much as I do. This is also a vampire redemption story, and I can be a sucker for redemption arcs when done in a compelling way.
We mostly follow two characters, Callus and Crow. Callus is a vampire and Crow is a kid he’s wrapped up into his adventures/revenge/redemption story.
The beginning of this book went by really, really fast. We are introduced to these two characters and Crow (formerly known as Ben) gets whisked off into Callus’s story within a couple of very short chapters. It was so fast it didn’t always make sense to me and I had to go back and re-read several chapters a couple times to make sure I wasn’t missing something. We are introduced to Callus, we’re then told a few days pass by without witnessing any of those events, and then all the sudden the two of them are leaving town under mysterious circumstances. All the while Crow thinks that Callus has killed his dad because he’s being super cryptic about why his dad isn’t coming along on their journey. Callus only says that his father was a very good friend of his and that he put Callus in charge of Ben/Crow’s safety. There’s just not a lot of explanation or character development time before we’re thrown into the action part of the plot. I would have liked to explore the first few days that Callus was on Crow/Ben’s ranch and gotten to know them before they ran off from the ranch for unclear reasons.
I do like how the vampire aspect was done with Callus. He’s followed around by crows, sunlight isn’t a pleasant experience, and he has a thirst for blood per typical vampire stuff. However, there’s an added element that he’s half native and feared/shunned from society often based on that without the townspeople ever knowing he’s also a vampire. Callus is pretty old, over 100 I think, and he’s struggled to gain control of his feeding compulsions. It’s a bad idea to wake him up before he’s ready. He definitely feels that this vampirism is a curse, and he’s striving to be a decent-ish person, mostly feeding on people that deserve it, or subsiding on animals when a suitable human meal isn’t available. However, again, it’s not a great idea to wake him up before he’s ready and can control his cravings. He needs about 12 hours of solid sleep in a coffin or a coffin substitute like a wardrobe.
There were a lot of time skips that were referenced in off hand comments like, “all summer I gave him trouble”, implying we’ve just skipped over several months with just a very brief synopsis of what happened during that time. This was happening early on, like within the first few chapters, and so things felt like they would lurch forward. I think it was a missed opportunity for more character development because I still don’t know these two all that well by the time we’re skipping over months. All this while, Crow’s not sure if Callus killed his father or not. He knows Cal’s a vampire and drinks blood. He knows that Cal is possibly drugging him with a potion to keep him bound to Callus, but it wasn’t clear to me because things went by so fast. We’re told about this in Crow’s thoughts rather than watching it play out on the page with dialogue. This book has a very narrative feel since there was limited dialogue and scenes playing out in real time — which is neither good or bad, just a style choice that I’m noting.
A third POV shows up later around the 30% mark after Cal and Crow got split up temporarily. I wasn’t sure if that annoyed me or not. I felt like I was just getting used to Callus and Crow and now there’s a Captain Laz to get to know in really short spurts. Each head hop is typically only a few pages long and it can get hard to follow.
The pieces do make sense in the end, there were a few things that I was still confused about but I think that’s due to a lack of me being able to retain all the info that can be thrown at you at once. I think this has a really neat core-story, world building ideas, but for me personally I got a bit lost from time to time.
Despite finding this a little difficult to follow, the story is definitely a unique Weird Western and I think would have appeal to people who want strange magic, strange people, strange circumstances, mixed in with a vampire mentor/mentee relationship. Perhaps if I were to physically read it instead of TTSing I would have had an easier time with it, so your mileage may vary on how choppy you feel it is!
I finished this book so it is marked as safe!