Deadtown and Other Tales of Horror Set in the Old West by Carl Hose

Long ago and far away, when I was but an impressionable young lad who would read practically anything and everything I could get my grubby little paws on, I often wondered why no one ever dared write 'the' Consummate Novel:  Professor Van Helsing teams with Holmes and Watson in hot pursuit of Professor Moriarity, who naturally has formed a villainous alliance with Baron Von Frankenstein, Count Dracula, and Dr. Jekyll.  The pursuit eventually leads to Wham, Texas where Harry Destry picks up his guns once again to join the fray.  In those days (to my young dismay), genres were generally carefully separated, so, ostensibly, one wouldn't get lost in the library or bookstore.  Today, thankfully, writers often combine, merge and/or run roughshod over genre lines.  So now, one can scarcely swing a dead prairie dog without hitting a horror/western, sci-fi/western, or other form of so-called 'weird western'. 

This brings us to Deadtown and Other Tales of Horror Set in the Old West by Carl Hose, published by MARLvision Press.  A collection, as the title indicates, of thirteen tales of terror, most set in the American Western frontier of the late 19th century.  The action kicks off with "It Rolled into Town" a rollicking, yet cautionary tale of inadvertent grave robbers Barton and Kincaid, two star-crossed crooks who have the misfortune of attempting to lay claim to the loot of a vengeance-minded Egyptian mummy.  The title track, if you will, "Deadtown" follows with drifter Frank Talbott riding into the ominously titular town.  Talbott, despite Hose's protestations to the contrary in his Introduction, is a totally engaging character who also appears in "Little Town of Aleone" and "Downtown Sundown" and could easily have been the inspiration for the Cullen Bohannon character in AMC's wonderfully gritty Hell on Wheels.  The collection wraps up with "Dead, White and Blue", a modern-day ghostly fable that takes its roots (so to speak) from the horrible travesties of the Civil War. 

The pdf version I read was well-laid out and comfortable to read.  The thumbnail doesn't do the evocative cover art justice; it really pops when viewed full-size.  The font (which carries over to the interior of the book in the print version) is just a little dramatic for my taste (particularly inside the book), but is certainly appropriate for the material.  The book is well-edited (my eagle-eye only caught one misspelling and a few punctuation problems which might've been caused by the pdf interpretation I read), and it's easy to access the various sections and contents.

Hose writes with the confident swagger of an old school genre expert; if the collection's title seems slightly unwieldy, his prose is perfectly straightforward and purposeful--yet elegant and descriptive when need be.  The stories are all well-structured, action-packed and loaded with intriguing characters, crackling dialog and occasionally, a little well-written erotica to boot.  Hose cleverly gut-slams the reader one moment, then unexpectedly touches the heart (or elicits a snicker) the next, bobbing and weaving like a champion prize fighter.  This is a quite enjoyable, very fun collection, particularly for those who like their genres mixed, shaken and stirred.  You can find more of Hose's work by visiting the Carl Hose Amazon Page.

-- Review by Walt Hicks