I had a blast with 'The Legend of Charlie Fish', the first book-length work from Texas storyteller Josh Rountree. It was a Texan tall tale, about a gill man, a makeshift family and the Galveston Flood, set for the most part in 1900. This follows suit, alternating between the present-day 1905 and the remembered 1879. While 'The Legend of Charlie Fish' showed clear influence from Joe R. Lansdale, 'The Unkillable Frank Lightning' combines that with Tod Browning for a heady mix of period weirdness, aided by a highly appropriate choice of typeface, elegant but a little old-fashioned.

We start out in 1905 as Dr. Catherine Coldbridge travels south from St. Louis, Missouri to Dallas, Texas, with the two Dawson brothers. She's hired them for good money: $500 each up front and double that on return. She isn't close to being your typical chaste female traveller, even though she's fifty-three years old. She drinks like a fish. She's slept with Aubrey more than once. And she raised her husband from the dead. Then again, she used to be a field doctor for the U.S. cavalry, so she's surely used to the earthier side of life.

As the title might suggest, her husband is a principal character here too, even though he's dead. In 1879, he was Frank Humble, fourth generation cavalry and married for only two weeks, and he was killed by the Sioux as he rode out of Fort Ellis, Montana. In 1905, though, he's the Unkillable Frank Lightning, working for Cowboy Dan's Wild West Revue, which are scheduled to play Dallas in the upcoming days. His wife has decided that, even though he's apparently unkillable, she will kill him anyway and that's why she brought the Dawsons.

Rountree's approach is to alternate chapters, so we learn a little in the present, then he fills us in on what we need to know from the past. Initially, we have to take this tall tale as read, which we're happy to do because his prose flows so effortlessly that it's like he's dropping this story on us on his back porch late one night while we get soused and enjoy the night air. If he deems that we should know something important, then, sure enough, he'll explain and we can just sit back and enjoy.

Most of that comes in the 1879 chapters, of course. We see that she brings him back out of sheer stubbornness and that, while it works, it seems like it doesn't, like something else has entered Frank's body that revels in crushing skulls and stamping soldiers to death. We see that she was able to do so because of Louisa Jupiter and the Three Rose Temple, who taught her something of the magickal world. And, crucially, we see that, having resurrected her husband but shocked at what he's become, Catherine runs. She's a coward or, at least, she was.

Some of it comes in the 1905 chapters too. We quickly learn, in their first meeting, that Frank is just not like that anymore and he hasn't been for the longest time. It was a short adjustment period of sorts and he's all right now. We learn that Frank's friend, Falling Bird, who guided his wife to his body and allowed her to bring him back, not just to the fort but to life, never left him and is still with him today at Cowboy Dan's. He's not a coward. And we learn that Catherine has changed her mind, even though Frank asks her to find a way to kill him.

While we likely had expectations of where this was going to go from the earliest chapters, that means that it's going somewhere else and I'm not going to spoil where. What I will say is that it unfolds cinematically with a number of showcase scenes that would make it trivial to adapt it to film. I'd love to see this as an indie feature, one with a decent budget but nobody in the cast we recognise, as long as they're up to the task, and a neo-grindhouse weird west vibe. There are a number of people who could do it justice.

There's serious opportunity for the right filmmaker. Catherine is a neat contradiction, someone who refuses to kowtow to social conventions as a tough and independent woman in an era that didn't think much of such things, who mastered enough magick to bring her husband back from the dead but who nonetheless ran like a coward from him because she thinks it all went wrong. Frank is a glorious character, who earns a living reenacting Indian attacks and being shot by an abundance of arrows, every night in the ring. He's green, because of course he is; it isn't hard to imagine the rest of his name being "N. Stein" because he's that clear an homage. And just like Frankenstein's monster, he's more human than his creator.

The supporting characters are worthy too. Falling Bird is a rock, who stuck with his friend partly because he's his friend but partly because it's simply the right thing to do, because someone has to be responsible for this monster and Catherine ran. The term "spirit guide" suddenly gains a lot of meaning in a highly unusual situation. The Dawson brothers could easily have been little but throwaway characters, guns for hire, but they grow individually and considerably over the course of the novel. They cease to be the Dawson brothers, a deadly pair, and become Aubrey and Seth, each with their own discernable and evolving character.

Just as Frank plays a considerable part in this novel, even having been killed before it began, it seems fair to point out that Louisa Jupiter plays a key part too, not only in the past when she's very much alive but also in the present, when she isn't. And there's also an old friend here that I wasn't expecting. Nowadays, he's a teenage sharpshooter called the Hurricane Kid, working for Cowboy Dan just like Frank. We know him as Hank Abernathy, one of the kids from 'The Legend of Charlie Fish', a book that he actually reads within this book, presumably suggesting that we didn't read an original Tachyon novella from 2023 by Josh Rountree, we read their reprint of a dime novel from sometime soon after 1900 that he merely presented to us.

While Hank was a good character in 'The Legend of Charlie Fish', it's fair to say that he was also overshadowed by his sister Nellie, who has second sight, and by Charlie Fish himself, a gill man they pick up on the road who's always going to steal the focus. However, Hank's grown into his own weirdness here, as it seems that he drowned in the Galveston Flood but was saved. It's the Hurricane Kid with the lightning-fast draw who sparks the real progression of story here and it all plays out wonderfully. Well, from our perspective, that is. Not so much for the characters; a disconnect that you'll have to explore for yourself.

Tellingly, while Hank grows considerably as a character once we realise who he is and after he does what he does, he's a worthy character even on first glance, performing for Cowboy Dan in the ring and backstage after it. That's because Rountree draws this company not as a collection of freaks but as a tight-knit community of performers working together to do special things. It's not just Frank and Hank, but Dan himself; Thirsty Picket, King of the Cowboys; Mabel Bones, a female trick shooter; and the rest of them. This novel feels more like a weird west in the neo-grindhouse style than a Universal horror, but this is straight out of Tod Browning.

I liked this a lot. Lansdale meets Browning seems like a gimme to me, but Rountree makes the style his own. It's a tall tale in the Texan tradition but one that embraces the deep darkness of the west. There's death in this western, all over it, but it's never black and white good guy and bad guy TV western. Everybody here has scars because they live and work on frontiers, whether that's the literal frontier of the Old West, the entertainment frontier that's a Wild West show or the ultimate metaphorical frontier that we call Death. Rountree assembles a great cast and puts on a great show. What's next? Encore! ~~ Hal C F Astell

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