Coming Next Week!

Expanding my catalog of books at Tule Fog Press this year. Starting off by adding two new genres for my indie publishing platform - Christian Fiction and Western. Mentioned our latest release yesterday (Ruth: A Journey to Faith by Revathi Selwyn). 

But today, I want to announce the release of D. M. Karder's rip-roaring, gunslinging Wild West adventure, Rising from the Ashes. (Note: Affiliate links to Amazon throughout.) It's currently up for pre-order and has a page at Goodreads now, so mark it "Want To Read!" :)

Here's the blurb...

Chicago, 1871. The city burns unrestrained. In a sea of people, a boy stands alone: young David Murphy. Witness through his mind’s eye his transformation from a desperate youth to one of the fiercest gunmen of the Wild West.

To capture Murphy’s story, an ambitious writer of Western lore is needed. Enter Vernon Shields who wants to publish an account that will define his career. When Shields meets a man now known simply as Longhair, he procures permission to write the gunman’s life story.

Rising from the Ashes is a tale of blazing guns that stretched from the Civil War to the turn of the twentieth century. The guns and the people who mastered them made their own destiny. Most men died as fast as they drew the steel. However, a few like Longhair walked the walk and lived to tell of their adventures of quick draws, ambush killings, and the excruciating challenges of life itself.

~*~

“Storytelling with no shortage of action, delivers a fresh spin on the turn of the century.” – Don G. Porter, Author of Yukon Murders

“Many events molded and transformed this country at the end of the nineteenth century. My goal is to put the reader in the boots of the main character, David Murphy. To provide an experience of what it was like to live life in the 1860s to 1890s, from Chicago’s great boom to the end of the Wild West.” – Author D. M. Karder

Book Review Thursday - The Troubleshooters

The Troubleshooters 

by William W. Johnstone (Guns of the Vigilantes #2)

I’ll say 3.5 stars. It was a good yarn, but a bit long and rambling. I got half way done and it kinda felt over (though the money stolen from the bank hadn’t been recovered), then a whole new cast of characters was introduced and off we went on another wild chase for the bad guys. Felt like two short novels put into one sprawling tale. Not bad writing or storytelling, actually, just some odd and surprising plot developments. 

The story started out pretty promising with Frank James (Jesse’s older brother) joining a posse in a small Texas town after the bank’s been robbed. He quotes Shakespeare and has evidently reformed his ways. An interesting character. Other supporting characters aren’t badly drawn either. The leader is deputy sheriff Dan Caine and the men set out but then immediately get ambushed. They regroup and try again, and this is where the plot starts to go off the rails.

(Spoilers next - although part of this is mentioned on the back blurb.) 

One of the posse members is an Italian priest who is on the search for a lycanthrope in order to bring him back to the Vatican along with a wayward sapphic nun who has founded an order of She Wolves that terrorize the prairie. This isn’t a ‘weird western’ (in the current meaning of that genre, that is, featuring actual werewolves and vampires and such), but it is fairly odd in that the characters are considering that there are such beasts roaming the world. Kinda crazy.

So what basically happens is that the story shifts from chasing the bank robbers to getting the money back from the leader of the She Wolves - whose pack of wild women had come across the robbers and killed them all, stealing the money. Definitely a surprising twist to a standard western posse vs bad guys trope. Later the Apaches enter in, there’s a massacre, and then we’re off to Ft. Worth for the final showdown.

A pretty wild ride overall, and if you’re really into westerns with a slightly skewed plot, this might be for you. Oh, and every now and then the author inserted an omniscient narrator voice who spoke from the future about the events as history ‘recorded’ them. Curious and interesting at times, but not your typical third person past approach.

Of course, William W. Johnstone didn’t write this novel (he’s been dead for some years), but I suspect his estate has a slew of house writers they use. Nothing wrong with that, but the storytelling style will change from book to book and series to series. Evidently, this is the second book in a vigilante series although I wouldn’t classify it as vigilante justice per se. Still, I enjoyed the novel enough to finish it. And whenever I need another quick and easy Johnstone western, I might try book number one.

Same review on Goodreads. 

~*~

This is Book #14 in my race to read/review 52 books this year.

Click here for a list of all my 52 Week Challenge reviews.

My Review of Blackfoot Dawn by John Legg

Blackfoot Dawn by John Legg is Book 2 of the Mountain Times trilogy, a western series set in the days of the mountain men (1830s/40s). The main character is a big, burly mountain guide and trapper named Squire. He’s got a mean streak a mile wide and is called L’on Farouche (the Fierce) by his enemies, the Blackfeet Indians.

This novel is a standalone, but picks up where Book 1, Winter Rage, ends. Hired by an outfitter to trap beaver in the Rockies, Squire and his crew face all the challenges one would expect in the wilderness – wild animals, extreme weather, Indians on the warpath, conniving competitors.

Through it all, the author offers a generally exciting and interesting series of adventures. Squire is a bit unlikeable, imo, but the secondary characters are well-drawn and have stories of their own to tell, so it’s pretty solid writing overall.

Plot: At the annual Rendezvous, Squire sees a long-time foe whom he suspects knows the location of his long-lost son, stolen by the Blackfeet some 16 years prior. The story then flashes back to Squire’s origin story (as a boy, how he became so violent, and then as a young man) and how he lost his first wife and child in an Indian raid coordinated by some by a man named Carney, his nemesis.

The narrative is gritty, ugly, raw, full of violence, torture, scalpings, rape, foul language (too many GD’s and n-words for my taste), and general mayhem. If you like strong, uncensored and unfiltered action, this series might be for you. I skimmed quite a bit of those scenes and the novel seemed a bit long to me, but again pretty engrossing at times.

I was probably overly harsh with my review of the first book in the series, Winter Rage. I rated that novel at just under 3 stars. But together, I would put the series at 3.25 stars so far. I’ll eventually finish the trilogy (Book 3 is Mountain Rage), but I need a break from all the violence.

This is my 9th book I've finished this year and below I'm listing the books read and am linking to my reviews of each book - a 52 week challenge. I'm a bit behind but may catch up in a few weeks. I'm usually reading 4 or 5 books at a time and sometimes finish a few within a few days of each other. (grin)

~*~

My 52 Week Challenge: Read and Review 52 Books in 2023
(Books listed in reading order, not review order, lol.)

1. Razored Land by Charles Gramlich - post-apocalypse (review TBD)
2. The Stroke of Winter by Wendy Webb - mystery (reviewed Jan 11)
3. Feast of Fools and Other Tales - S&S anthology (reviewed Jan 19)
4. Clovel Sword Saga (Vol 1&2) by Gordon Brewer - S&S (review TBD)
5. The Hike by Susi Holliday - mystery/thriller (reviewed March 7)
6. Valengetrix: Ghost of Aratania by J.R. Cason - sword & sorcery (reviewed Feb 25)
7. Swords & Heroes - Sword & Sorcery Anthology (edited by me! review TBD)
8. The Viking Gael Saga by J.T.T. Ryder - historical fiction (reviewed March 9)
9. Blackfoot Dawn by John Legg - a mountain man western (reviewed above)

Monster Fight at the O.K. Corral Anthology

Let's do this thing! Accepting stories for a new Weird Wild West anthology to be launched via Kickstarter in March, 2023. Title: Monster Fight at the O.K. Corral.

Looking for 12 to 15 new and original western horror tales, from 3k to 5k words each. Artwork, too. Funded via Kickstarter. Contributor paperback and $40 one-time payment (with bonus incentives). 

Sub window open now through Dec 31, 2022. Email me (see graphic) for complete guidelines and payment proposal. All writers welcome.

Story Behind - New Life at Death Springs

Earlier this week I mentioned The Return - A Contact Window Story in which I played in another person's sandbox. ;) That is, I wrote a story within the universe of a friend's creative IP (intellectual property), with their permission. It's a kind of fan fiction. I liked what they did and wanted to add a story to that world.

For today's story behind the story, I did something similar. My friend Stoney Setzer writes Christian suspense and supernatural thrillers and mysteries; Twilight Zone-like stories. I even published a collection of his works (found here) called Zero Hour. (book cover to left) In one of his stories, Stoney features a prophet name Obadiah Riddle. Great character, compelling story.

It's been a few years since that released, but I kept thinking about Obadiah Riddle. So with Stoney's permission, I wrote "New Life at Death Springs." (A supernatural western of about 3200 words.) I tried capturing the same feel that Stoney put into his original piece, and sent it to him for edit and approval. He added a scene or two and clarified some things, and so I think the story really came out well.

Free Fiction Friday!

If you're interested in reading it, the story will be free for download here for one week.

"New Life at Death Springs" is set in an "Old West" town of Death Springs, Arizona (fictional, of course) and features an evil mayor, an oppressed town, and a deceived preacher. The Lord sends Obadiah into the middle of the mess to see if new life can spring from this deathly place. You might guess at the answer to that, but getting there was a blast and the story is a good one. :)

Trigger Warning! This is a Christian themed short story, by the way. Not for the whiny hearted. ;)

Next up in my quest to write 30 stories in 60 days, I'll talk about "One Midsummer's Night," a dark fantasy of about 2800 words. Follow my progress here. Check out the 'Current Projects' tab above for more stories.

(Note: cover art is Monument Valley landscape © publicdomainstockphotos, ID 96054875, Dreamstime Stock Photos; cover font is Exo (byline) and Ostrich Sans (book title) from Font Squirrel, freely licensed for commercial use.)

Hard Country by William W. Johnstone

A Town Called Fury is a series of (currently 3) western books written by an anonymous author (or authors) writing under the name "William W. Johnstone With J.A. Johnstone." The first novel was published by Pinnacle (an imprint of Kensington Publishing Corp.) in July 2006 but with the co-author listed as Fred Austin (see the cover to the right). It was subsequently released with J.A. Johnstone as the co-author (see left cover) probably to better build the Johnstone brand since William Johnstone died in 2004. It appears that all new Johnstone books are now being released in this manner.

I recently read Hard Country, the second in the series. The first one, A Town Called Fury, is reviewed at Western Fiction Review. The third book is Judgment Day. While the story telling is solid, there is nothing particularly grabbing about the plot. Some feuding, gunfighting, a group of bandits abduct some ladies in the town - including the Marshall's girlfriend as well as his younger sister - and a posse heads out to rescue them. Some nice action, but not a lot of depth to the characters. Like the reviewer wrote at WFR, it "didn’t offer anything new to the seasoned western reader."

However, if you like light fast-paced fare before bedtime, this book answers the call. And since I got the book through BookMooch it was worth it. I'll probably mooch the first and third books in the series eventually, just so I can catch more of the back story and find out what happens next. And really, that's all a publisher wants - enough interest in a series so a person goes out and buys the next one.

Now I did enjoy the first book in Sidewinders (another 3 book series). The two heroes in this novel have character and the story is a bit more complex. Will have to get the second and third books in that series as well. Once my night stand clears!

Note: I also see now that J.A. Johnstone is releasing his first book without the imprimatur of ('uncle') William. The Loner is reviewed here.