The Shotgun Arcana by R.S. Belcher Book Review

    The SHOTGUN ARCANA by R.S. Belcher is the sequel to THE SIX-GUN TAROT that I very much enjoyed. It once more returns us to the town of Golgotha, Nevada where the town undertaker is a mad scientist and the Sheriff cannot die. I very much was interested in this book and picked up immediately after finishing the first. I was not disappointed but I do have some minor complaints about the book.

    The premise is that the events of the first book have passed but things have not entirely gotten back to normal. The town has not so much changed as it's participants have been hardened by the events of fighting the Wurm. Unfortunately, life going on has not been kind to some. Poor Auggie the shopkeeper has found himself in debt to the fallen angel Biq, Mutt is threatened with lynching for dating a white woman, and the Mayor finds himself even more immersed in the politics he's desperate to escape.

    Unfortunately, things are about to get even worse as a mysterious man named Ray Zeal is coming to Golgotha to retrieve the First Murderer's Skull. He has a army of serial killers, rapists, and psychopaths that he is leading down on the town in order to acquire it. The fact he's a fallen angel like Biq makes it especially difficult to stop him.

    I liked the story and all of the various twists and turns it employs but I also note that it's somewhat similar to the original book. There's a bunch of excessively evil monsters out to destroy the entire world. The story also plays out mostly the same sort of way. This isn't necessarily a crippling flaw but it was a noticeable one. I initially liked the relationship between Constance and Jim developing, though I didn't when I remembered he was sixteen and she was fourteen. That made it all sorts of squick. 

    Much of the book's midpart is devoted to the fact that the position of women in the Old West was, shockingly, not great and no one initially cares when one of the doves gets killed by a client. Even our otherwise progressive lawmen. I liked how Maud and new character, Rowan, set about to do their best to establish protections for the local working women. I found this plot more interesting than the actual apocalypse story.

    In conclusion, this was a very fun book and had a lot of development but I didn't like it as much as the Six-Gun Tarot. I think the stories are at their best when dealing with smaller scale adventures and character development rather than trying to stop the end of everything. The villains are all very one-dimensional and I think that hurts the conflicts. Still, I'm definitely picking up the rest of the series.

9/10

Available here