This is a Weird Western. No, I’m sorry; let me start over.

This is a WEIRD Western. It’s not just a case of a basic western with a few ghosts or werewolves shoehorned in. No, it’s seriously bizarre. It starts out normally enough with the hero, Marshal Elias Faust, being asked by a local drunk to retrieve something a couple of thugs stole from him. What it was, he won’t say, but Faust heads off to find the two lowlifes, known as the Gregdon boys.

What begins as a typical Wild West gunfight ends up taking Faust on a mind-bending and horrifying trip into the depths of cosmic nightmare. We’ve got a woman made of gold appearing from the stars, a hellish netherworld buried in the mines beneath a harsh frontier town, and, perhaps most notably, demonic sand-filled scarecrow spirits with rifles.

It’s a lot for the poor lawman to deal with. Fortunately, he has a few people backing him up, such as Grady Cicero, a Shakespearean actor who is a crack shot with a Henry rifle, and Lachrimé Garland, who has managed enough boxing matches that she’s usually able to give Faust some good pep talks after he gets into fights, which happens a lot.

This book is violent, befitting a western. Shootouts, chases, and knock-down, drag-out fistfights are the order of the day, and Faust never shies away from combat, even when he is dragged down to the unfathomable shores of some Boschian hellscape.

I was about to say this book does a good job of mixing western action with Lovecraftian horror. But I had to stop myself, because while it is easy to reflexively label any kind of cosmic horror as being in the manner of HPL, that would be misleading. Lovecraft’s protagonists are scholarly, bookish fellows, who summon occult horrors by reading some dusty old tome when they shouldn’t.

No, Elias Faust is in the mold of a Robert E. Howard hero: he’s tough, rough, and mean. He solves things with his fists and his guns. The setting, too, is reminiscent of Howard: a near-lawless wasteland, ruled by greed, violence, and the occasional eldritch abomination.

The writing is both witty and brutal, with Faust’s gallows humor often making the unrelenting fight scenes a little snappier. At times, the bloody battles can be so visceral as to be exhausting to read, but Faust’s narration always keeps them interesting, and it makes you want to stick with him to the end as he slowly uncovers the horrors at the heart of the web spun by a malevolent entity known as “the Magnate.”

It’s a harrowing, pulse-pounding, spine-chilling, and occasionally darkly funny ride into stygian abysses of madness and mayhem. If you like the Weird West genre, I can pretty much guarantee you’ll love this.