Dead Iron (Review)
Dead Iron (Review)
o this one is a steampunk western. With magic. It’s even got an airship in there. Did we leave any genres out?
And I love the tag line on the book “America was built on blood, sweet, and gears.” Very cute.
So our hero protagonist in this thing is a loner-drifter guy up in the NorthWest in the 1870s or so with a bit of a backstory. You see, Cedar Hunt is a werewolf. And it’s that high-moon-riding time of the month. A boy has gone missing and Cedar wants to find him. The problem is, he’s got to find him as a human, because if he’s a wolf, he’ll eat the child.
And if that doesn’t interest you, we’ve got witches. A poor woman who is a witch and is feeling drawn back to her New England coven has lost her interracial husband – he’s missing and presumed dead.
And yet there’s more. He is dead. Deader than dead. Yes, zombie-dead. Maybe she should have rethought that spell about being together forever.
Not satisfied? The evil railroad baron who is bring his rails west is something not quite human. And he’s got a… thing… working for him who isn’t a who so much as a what. And his evil plans might bring the apocalypse to our world.
So yes, Dead Iron has a lot going for it. Battles and spells and tropes aplenty. Its a very busy book. I will mention that we had another packaged airship that popped into ready-to-go order in no time at all (but this has magic-tech behind it so I guess that’s okay). It was certainly an interesting book with characters and crazy-shit galore.
Did I like it? Mostly. Maybe the writing was a tad too flowery (and that’s coming from me, the king of overwriting). And it seemed that it took forever to get to the conclusion – I can’t say why this felt this way, perhaps from the number of false starts and double-backs that the plot followed. The evil guy would spend entire chapters gloating, which slowed things. Not only that, he treated his servant-creature like shit, and the time-honored trope there is that it comes back to bite him in the ass (which didn’t happen, to my surprise).
This is supposed to be the first in a series – I’m not sure if it ever came to fruition. But if you like your westerns with steam-stuff and crazy magic, maybe I’ve found a new author for you to check out. Devon Monk is her name, and you can probably Amazon this one.