Western Book Reviews | Self-Publishing Review

Review: Skunks Dance by St. John Karp

★★★★

Spivey Spillane is an honest guy. He loves his grandmammy, he loves his home, and he would bring ruin to any man who would rob him of his simple happiness. It’s the American way, and it’s God’s too. Unfortunately for the Spillane family name, there is such a man, and he’s running loose across the state of California, tipping cattle and penning indecent plays under the guise of Spillane himself. Oh, and there’s the fortune that only he knows the location of, too. Just one more reason to find Alabama Sam and fill him with lead, really.

Meanwhile, several […]

James Grimsby2020-02-21T06:29:35+02:00November 7th, 2016|Categories: Book Reviews|Tags: Contemporary Fiction Book Reviews, Humor, Western Book Reviews|

Review: GunKnight by Cynthia & Scott Green

GunKnight, the first part of The GunKnight Chronicles by Cynthia & Scott Green, is a quirky sci-fi story set in a world where guns are sacred tools which the desperate and the proud alike must live by. Colt, the only known surviving GunKnight – a technoreligious warrior clad in a powerful suit of biotech armor – wakes up in a dusty crater, alone, with only a crippling pain and a flickering heads-up display to jog his memory and guide his path through what may be a dead Earth.

As his memories return, his “mission” becomes more and more clear, […]

James Grimsby2014-05-30T14:11:07+02:00May 30th, 2014|Categories: Book Reviews|Tags: Fantasy Book Reviews, Western Book Reviews|

Review: Finding Billy Battles by Ronald E. Yates

Finding Billy Battles is the story of a rather remarkable character who lived during the last part of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. The book is fiction, but according to the author, draws heavily on the author’s family history. Nonetheless, the book reads like a novel and never seems like those, usually unsuccessful, attempts to interest other people in one’s own family stories. The book gets off to a somewhat slow start, using the frame device of Battles’ great-grandson finding his great-grandfather’s journals, but soon enough becomes a page-turner about a fascinating, multidimensional character and […]

Avery Hurt2019-01-24T19:46:44+02:00May 6th, 2014|Categories: Book Reviews|Tags: Historical Fiction Book Reviews, Western Book Reviews|

Review: A Far Cry From Living by Luke Prochnow

Luke Prochnow strikes an unusual balance of darkness in his post-apocalyptic Western novella A Far Cry From Living. In a world reminiscent of others like Fallout‘s New Vegas and other “Westernpunk” works, the book is unflinching in its descriptions of the violence, murder, paranoia and slavery, but makes the right choice of situations to view, and the right levels of horror and brutality for each chapter.

Descriptions are never egregious or gratuitous, focusing on the slow, dry feel of an empty and dead desert populated by the desperate and lonely, and sorrow and regret permeate the entire book in […]

James Grimsby2014-05-06T14:04:11+02:00January 22nd, 2014|Categories: Book Reviews|Tags: Apocalyptic Fiction Book Reviews, Western Book Reviews|

Review: Jesse James and the Secret Legend of Captain Coytus by Alex J. Mueck

Jesse James and the Secret Legend of Captain Coytus is the latest offering by Alex J. Mueck, an author who has shifted from more serious crime work to achieving more interesting edges in previous book Myth Man and to a much further extent in this new and bizarre title, which explores the story of Jesse James and the “truth” of his story, as ascribed by a delinquent student’s graduate thesis determined to expose this “secret legend” for fame, fortune and girls.