Red Rabbit
3.0 Stars
1-27-2024

A dark, gothic, western, weird, adventure story. The first ~50% of the book is propulsive and really enjoyable, as gamblers, gunslingers, bandits, ghouls, lycanthropes, witches, witch-hunters, ghosts, devils, and school teachers variously chase, flee, ally, and betray each other across the cursed land of Kansas. This first half is pleasingly morbid, with plenty of gory and inventive death, but without crossing over into Laird Barron or Ballingrud horror-depressiveness. It also does a good job of developing the characters both backwards and forwards in time, steadily revealing new bits of history that put current struggles in new lights. Unfortunately the book doesn't really nail the landing. What should be a climactic finish instead gets drawn out and over-explained, and the pacing slows down to a crawl. As a finale the author then re-tells the story in abbreviated form, not once but twice, reviewing and reflecting on the past actions from 2 additional viewpoints. It didn't work for me! Listening to this on audio-book, there was a solid one-hour period where I was in bewilderment and repeatedly asking myself "why hasn't this book ended yet?!". As a final quibble, the ending doesn't really have a supportable moral viewpoint with regard to the witches. The various witches are first portrayed as a threat, then as misunderstood but basically good and enlightened people who are unfairly persecuted by benighted yokels. The yokels were right though! Or at least they have the right idea, even if their particular grievances are kind of silly. The witches in the story were way too dangerous and way too careless with power to be around civilians, and this made it difficult to accept the pro-witch ending that was offered.

Oh! I almost forgot. The audiobook does have 2 genuinely nice renditions of Western trail songs. So that is one additional positive thing that the book did. Not enough to reach 4 stars though. Ad tres astra per aspera.