Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian
2023’s Red Rabbit, by Alex Grecian, is a solid entry in a category of speculative fiction I call fantastical Americana. Set in the American Midwest a few years after the Civil War, the book starts when some men in a town in Burden County, Kansas, put a bounty on the head of the local witch. This brings all kinds of killers into the county. Meanwhile, farther south, two former union soldiers partner up with Old Tom, self-proclaimed witch-master, and the mute child, Rabbit, who travels with him. As they head up to Kansas, they meet Rose Nettles Mullins, newly widowed, who decides to travel with them. Joe, Rose’s dead husband, had his spirit shaken lose from his body, and decides to go along to make sure Rose is all right. Only one of the party can see him, and only at certain times.
Moses Burke, one of the two soldiers, is a Black man who was trained as a medic during the war. He and Ned Hemingway aren’t interested in killing a witch, but the trip sounds interesting. Besides, Old Tom insists he’s already killed the witch via magic. He’s only going north to collect his earnings.
Old Tom is wrong on a few counts. He hasn’t killed the witch, Sadie Grace, who is preparing to face many men who plan to kill her. One is Duff Duncan, a cowhand from a nearby ranch, who has persuaded himself that Sadie let his fiancé die. More troubling is Ubel Crane, a scholar as well as a witch-hunter, who has written several successful novels about killing witches and demons. Sadie isn’t worried about them or even the sadistic trio of former Confederate soldiers who show up later—her real concern is the force she feels emanating from the south, following a strange group of six, or maybe seven, headed her way.
Alex Grecian
The novel is picaresque. On their trek, Moses, Ned and the others encounter deadly magics right and left; a suicide forest; a town of cannibals, and a deserted ranch taken over by a demon and its human servant, just to name a few. The risks grow the closer they get to Burden County. Along the way, we learn more about each of the members of this strange “posse,” which grows when another member joins their crew. Several of them remain mysteries to us, and no one is more mysterious than Rabbit.
We discover that Sadie is not as evil as the local men have claimed. She’s been made a scapegoat by men who can’t acknowledge their own greed, fear or hypocrisy. At the other end of the continuum, it becomes less and less likely that Rabbit is an innocent, ordinary child.
The tone and the specifics of the book feel like folklore; this could be some “tall tale” out of the Ozarks. The book is filled with adventure, chills and thrills, and plenty of gore. There are ambushes and gunfights; there are demonic monsters and human ones. Despite the amount of death and dismemberment, there is a distance to the descriptions and the emotional tone that makes this book almost brisk rather than horrifying. The fact that death, for many, is only an inconvenience adds to that gentle distance. I was a bit startled at the end of the book when I added up how many people were dead. (To be fair, several of them were dead before the story started. There are a lot of ghosts.)
Grecian also blends the grotesque with the humorous here to good effect. In one scene a demon sets a dead, headless body dancing around, just for entertainment. Then he forgets about it, and is angry when it bumps into him. That was funny.
The world-building, the deadpan humor, the landscape and the magic all add up to an enjoyable read. I wanted to know what would happen next, but I really didn’t want the book to end.
The two books are nothing alike in plot or tone, but I’m left with the feeling that the world of Alix E. Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches is very close to Grecian’s world, and that’s a compliment to Grecian. If you liked the Harrow book and also like “weird west,” you owe it to yourself to give this one a try.
These weird westerns are always interesting and have been popping up more in recent times (it seemed like there was a big gap between Robert E. Howard’s stories in this setting and R. S. Belcher’s Golgotha novels). The magic is represented in American folkloric elements instead of the tropes employed in more traditional fantasies. Most of the people in this story are not magically talented, which proves a fatal weakness when they encounter the very powerful ones who can work magic, so the body count ends up extremely high. I found it hard to get too attached to any of the nominal protagonists, but that turned out to be a bit fortunate, in that quite a few of them end up dead before this is over. The viewpoint also wanders around a little too much within chapters, making one’s sense of character continuity more difficult to maintain. So this book shares some of both the attractions and the drawbacks of Belcher’s works. Stark Holborn is also mining this territory with her books Nunslinger and Triggernometry.
this sounds like a fun one