Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Those Poor, Poor Bastards: Dead West - Book 1 by Tim Marquitz, J.M. Martin, and Kenny Soward - Fightin' deaduns in the wild west

4 of 5 Stars

Nina Weaver and her Pa have come to Coburn Station to trade for supplies.  They barely leave town with their lives.  Dead West - Book One: Those Poor, Poor Bastards opens with a bit of a ruckus that quickly erupts into full-blown chaos.

I've read a lot of Zombie tales over the years, but none has ever begun as strangely as this one.  There are some genre bending twists right at the start which I really enjoyed and then we were quickly on more familiar ground, albeit dusty ground, this is the old west in the 1800's, after all.

The language is as raw as the times and that's pretty rough.  I can't even post the quote I want to here, or Amazon would be editing me when I post the review there.  Let's just say it's rough enough to have ladies of the evening tossing liquid waste from second story windows.  In addition to the language there is plenty of offensive stereotyping complete with the slang that, thanks to modern political correctness, has all but been elimited from polite conversation.  However, in the post Civil War 1800's, it's still commonplace.

For the most part  Dead West - Book One: Those Poor, Poor Bastards Is fast paced and entertaining as all get out.  The writers certainly managed to come up with a diverse group of characters who played well off one another creating both friction and friendships leading to plenty of internal conflict as well as having to fend off the deaduns.  

I did think things got a bit bogged down in the second half, but overall I found Dead West - Book One: Those Poor, Poor Bastards to be a very quick and enjoyable read that left me wanting more.  Fortunately, I shouldn't have long to wait, as Book Two is due next month and a third book in the series is already in the works. 

Dead West - Book One: Those Poor, Poor Bastards is available now for the Kindle at Amazon.com and is published by Ragnarok Publications.

No comments:

Post a Comment