Author: Guy Adams
Publisher: Solaris
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
This is the inaptly-named book three in a trilogy, at least the last two volumes of which are named after two movies in the "spaghetti" western trilogy which brought Clint Eastwood to major stardom in the sixties, with the movie title's use of 'dollars' replaced by 'souls' in the book titles. Other than that play on words, the stories here have nothing whatsoever in common with those classic movies.
I wasn't really sure what to expect going into this. The blurb made it sound interesting, but that just means that the blurb did its job in luring me in. It doesn’t mean that the blurb informed at all as to what this story is actually about. One thing I did expect when I began this, was that I'd get a coherent story, which I could follow and which made sense, but this isn't what was delivered. I freely admit that this might well have been because I'd missed the earlier volumes.
In fact, I rather quickly got the strong feeling that I needed to have read both previous volumes before I embarked upon this one, because what were to me random characters began showing up anew in each chapter with no information about who they were or what they were doing or why, or what connection they had to anything or anyone else. There was no back-story - which is a good thing if the only alternative is huge info-dumps, but a really bad thing if the reader hasn't read the previous material, or has read it so long ago that details have been forgotten.
The story began as though it was a traditional western with the supernatural thrown in, but in a chapter soon afterwards, we learned there are motor vehicles. Yes, there were motor vehicles in what we view as the old west, but they were rare and primitive initially. The movie The Wild Bunch acknowledges this, as does Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, both of which I recommend. The problem here though, was that there was no context. Are we in relatively modern times, in 'the cowboy era' but as the wild west is fading? Are we in a time where different eras are somehow bleeding into one another? There was no guidance on this at all - not in the part I managed to complete before giving up from a toxic mix of boredom and frustration.
In some ways, this novel is reminiscent of the movie Cowboys & Aliens, except that the aliens are demons here. The main character in chapter one, Atherton, is an Englishman fresh from some unspecified business in Africa. For some reason he was in New York City when a new town suddenly and literally sprang up from nowhere, out west. He was somehow 'assigned' to it (how or why was not specified), and the town it turns out, is populated with demons. Atherton decides (upon what authority, we’re not told), that he needs to destroy the town and the demons in it.
There's a second story told interspersed with the first. This is the tale of Arno James and Veronica, both living in Heaven. In life they did not know each other, indeed could not since they lived at different times. In death, slain by the lover of his unfaithful wife, Arno is thrilled that Veronica, the first person he meets, turns out to enjoy his company, but this isn’t enough for him.
Told by the mysterious Alonzo, who appears to be in charge up here, that Heaven is so poorly populated these days because most people think they deserve no better than Hell, Arno decides to visit Hell and find out what’s going on there. Of course, this 'explanation' does nothing to explain why Heaven - which must have been steadily populated for thousands of years - has failed retain even its original populace.
Worse than any of this, however, is that the story did nothing whatsoever to pull me in. I've read books (I found two different ones over the last week) where I was grabbed from the first page and couldn't put it down, but this one failed to get my attention, much less my good will. It gave me no compelling reason to be interested in what was going on, and it gave me no character(s) to identify with, to relate to, or to become curious about. Given all of that, and given that there are other, more enticing volumes sitting on shelves and devices, I couldn't sustain sufficient interest in this to continue with it.
