The Six-Gun Tarot by R.S. Belcher Review

    SIX-GUN TAROT is a book that I wished I'd written, which is one of those praises that only writers get to throw out or would-be writers (or anybody) but it still has a lot of meaning. Basically, it has everything I love in a novel from the Wild West to monsters to antiheroes to the Cthulhu Mythos (but set up against supernaturals of Heaven and Hell). They even manage to put some nice social commentary in the book about race relations and homophobia.

    The premise of the book is that a boy named Jim is attempting to cross the 40 Mile Desert a.k.a. Lahontan Valley, Nevada. It is a somewhat suicidal action for a boy with just a horse and no supplies but he manages to survive thanks to the efforts of Mutt, a Native American Deputy for the town of Golgotha. From there, he becomes embroiled in a billion-year-old conflict between God, the Devil, and a primordial evil drawing inspired from the writings of H.P. Lovecraft.

    I like the town of Golgotha because it is basically a 19th century version of Sunnydale, California. There's angels, demons, mad scientists, evil cults, demigods, shapechangers, and a partridge in a pear tree. I'm very much of a fond of fantasy kitchen sink settings (thank you, TV tropes) and I suspect it may be do to the fact that I'm a huge superhero fiction fan. Golgotha is very deliberately ridiculously over the top and is all the more fun for it.

    "Harry, it was right before that trouble with the giant bat thing swooping in and carrying people off?" 

     "How could I forget that? We lost the best barber this town ever had."

    The book makes the wise decision of not focusing on any specific single character but making the book an ensemble piece. If you don't like one or two of the characters, you're bound to like others. The protagonists are also archetypal but fairly deep and the author is not afraid to give them flaws either. Sometimes flaws that make you believe they aren't good people at all. That doesn't make them boring, though, and that is a much better thing for a reader.

    Mayor Pratt, for example, is a Mormon with supernatural responsibilities and the struggle of being a closeted gay man in the 19th century. However, Pratt is terrible to his youngest wife and also racist against Native Americans. Maud's grandmother was a protector of women and supernatural heroine but she also ended up a plantation owner, which makes a lot of her dialogue about freedom and justice ring hollow. The book doesn't revel in the racism and sexism of the period but it also acknowledges it exists and that is the best way to handle Western fiction in modern times.

    The book perhaps takes on a little more than it can chew. Parts of the book deal with the War against the Dark at the beginning of the universe, the Fall of Lucifer, and other things that distract from the quirky little town that is the most interesting part of the book. While I appreciate the ambition, I tended to prefer the supernatural plots that were grounded in reality. Whether revenge murders, loveless marriages, racism, and mourning the loss of their recently departed spouse.

    In conclusion, I think this was a very solid work and is probably my second or third favorite read of the year. It's a nice mixture of fantasy, horror, and the Wild West. The characters are fun and the world is set up for what I hope will be a fairly long series. I should note that in addition to reading the Kindle version of the book, I also listened to the graphic audio production of this. I really enjoyed the narration and suggest picking that up instead of the book version. The production value was fantastic.

9/10

Available here