By Hunter Shea

I’m not usually a fan of book westerns. Maybe it’s because I’m British, or maybe I’ve just read the wrong types, but they’ve never completely grabbed me. I like the aesthetic, I like some of the films, but as for books…well, the ones I have read tend to be a bit lofty. Again, there might be reasons for this I can’t quite grasp. The idea of the Western genre is something I am definitely fascinated by. As we were told at university, the Western is the founding myth for the USA. Its influence stretches across the years, seeping into the majority of American media.

Maybe my general dislike of the setting in novels is why Ghost Mine didn’t initially grab me. The opening was creepy enough to keep me interested, but it lost me just a tad when we were introduced to the main character.

Nat is a cowboy turned lawman, though he isn’t too fussed on the city lifestyle in New York. He’s excited when Teddy Roosevelt asks him to investigate a strange town, where not only the townspeople have disappeared, but the soldiers Roosevelt sent to look into it have too. Nat takes his partner and friend Teta to investigate. They travel by train to Hecla, and at this point I really wasn’t finding Nat interesting, as a main or POV character.

On a personal level, it was hard to follow him, but once the characters arrived in Hecla, I was glad I stuck with it.

In this strange, abandoned mining town, the action picks up, and during the events that follow we learn more about Nat, his history and his current state of mind, deepening his character.

This book might start off slow, but once it gets going there’s a lot happening. Shea manages to combine various aspects from religion, folklore and mythology, yet weaves it into the story so it all fits together. Rather than feeling like a mish-mash, it creates a unique setting and set of challenges for our cowboy hero and sidekick.

Shea mixes black eyed children, Bigfoot, aspects of Native American folklore, the devil and Christianity to create a situation so messed up and difficult to untangle, it leaves the reader scratching their head as much as the characters, and it bloody well works.

This is the second book by Shea I’ve read, the first being the fantastic Creature, and it’s always great to see a writer going in different directions for each book. The two protagonists couldn’t be more different, the threats in both cases are vivid, imaginative, and really have nothing in common, and though the settings in these two books are remote, with a lot of attention paid to detail, but they are both unique. Shea is a bloody brilliant writer, with a talent for crafting extremely human characters going up against very non-human threats, in settings designed to make your spine tingle and question everything.

I may not have been a fan of literature Westerns before this, but at the hands of a talented writer and combined with horror, I’d definitely be keen to check out more.

Grade: A

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Mine-Fiction-Without-Frontiers-ebook/dp/B07RG5TT93

Review by Elle Turpitt
@elleturpitt
elleturpitt.com

I received a paperback copy from Flame Tree Press for review consideration.