The writing style is very stilted with short, sharp, sentences and sentence fragments. What really took me out of the story though was the repetition. I was told that Desmond was a door keeper in various ways four times on the second page of the story. I counted! There are occasional typos, for example, “Things likes watches,” and full stops are used where you would expect commas e.g. “…a simple thing. But it was…” In some ways trying to read this felt like fighting punctuation to assemble complete sentences from the fragments offered, and it did make it hard for me to get into the story.

And it was well worth reading. By the third chapter it found its pace and the writing style relaxed and flowed more fluidly. While it leads into another story and has a great sequel hook, it is a full tale in its own right with beginning middle and end. There is adult content, including rape, murder and cannibalism, but it is a borderline Western/Horror story about a wendigo so what else do you expect?

Amelie and Jake are both interesting characters, although we don’t really spend enough time with the supporting cast to flesh them out. I suspect that as with many series, if you read the other books you will learn more about them. This is part of the genre known as Weird West, the Wild west crossed with ghosts, goblins, superstitions and more and where the supernatural is real. It is more blatant about it than many similar titles, like Skinwalker for example, but it works as a short story.

I enjoyed it, and fans of the Weird West genre or variations on urban paranormal might like it too. Unfortunately the writing style and first couple of chapters drop it down as it won’t have much appeal outside those genres, for example classic Western fans many not enjoy it.