REVIEWED BY DAVID VINEYARD:         


R. S. BELCHER – The Shotgun Arcana. Golgotha #2. Tor, hardcover, 2014; trade paperback, 2015.

   The moon was a bullet hole in the sable night, bleeding ghostlight across the wasteland of the 40-Mile Desert.

   That’s not an opening to a Western you are likely to forget, and as you might expect one you will long remember in the case of this ghastly Gothic tale of the small town of Golgotha, Nevada in 1870 where the population includes a fallen angel (Malachi Bick) and his daughter Emily, mad scientist Clay Turlough (“Soul wouldn’t need protecting if the transportation for it was designed a bit more steadily.”) who practices reanimating heads, and Maud, grand-daughter of Anne Bonny ( who disclosed to her the secret history of the world — the story of Lilith, the first human to rebel agains the tyranny of heaven…) and herself a retired pirate queen and practitioner of Lilith magic who lives with her psychic daughter Constance.

   Despite that, Golgotha is a fairly peaceful town watched over by Sheriff John Highfather and his deputies young Jim and Mutt and Mayor Harry Pratt and his lover, gunfighter Ringo, but forty years earlier Malachi Bick was part of a rescue party that found the Donners and retrieved a cursed skull that is about to release hell on Earth — literally

   Lead by the demonic fallen angel Raziel Zeal (“… the Keeper of Secrets, the vessel of divine knowledge, one of the Princes of the Second Heaven …”) an army is riding toward Golgotha, an army of lunatics, murderers, cannibals, thugee, and worse all drawn to the skull and Zeal’s ambitious plans to destroy mankind before killing God.

    “…cities will become slaughterhouses, civilizations will burn, and in time, slowly, painfully, the human race will die screaming, at its own hand.”

   The Gothic Western has never been a prolific genre. Walter Van Tilberg Clark’s Track of the Cat is likely the best known, though a few ghosts, spirits, werewolves, and the like appear in the pulps, and on screen there are films like High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider hinting at demons and devils. Stephen King’s Dark Tower borrows many elements from the Western, notably in it’s central figure Roland, the Gunfighter, but outright Gothic Western horror, aside from the likes of the Wild Wild West is rare.

   Which is why this beautifully written rollicking novel is such a delight, from the imagery (The noonday sky was dark with screaming crows …) to an apocalyptic battle between good and evil fought by mortal men and fallen angels in the middle of the Nevada desert. It’s a Gothic, stream-punk, splatter punk, high adventure, horror, dark fantasy, Western coming of age story.

   The sky was deepest indigo. Ribbons of dying umber, crimson and gold wavered at the jagged teeth of the horizon. The stars, bright and burning and ancient, unfurled before them from behind a gauze curtain of clouds.

   The Shotgun Arcana is a wild ride easily one of the most enjoyable extravaganzas in years, Quentin Tarantino crossed with Sergio Leone by way of Stephen King.


Bibliographic Notes:   The Shotgun Arcana was preceded by The Six-Gun Tarot (2013) and followed by The Queen of Swords (2017)