Before I get into today’s article, I want to share that I’m still updating “Wow, That’s a Lot of Views” with stories about my adventures as I get likes on the post. I haven’t figured out how to notify folks when I make an update, so if you’re curious, make sure to go back and check it for more anecdotes.
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When I sat down to do this review, I wanted to look back and see what I said about Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian when I read it back in February. That’s when I discovered that I’d read the book during my break from my blog (and really, most of my life) after my dad’s stroke.
So y’all get a bonus two-fer review!
If you enjoyed playing Red Dead Redemption or reading Stephen King’s Dark Tower books and stories, you’ll probably enjoy Alex Grecian’s two novels set in late 1800s America where witches, ghosts, demons, and angels are real. They’re both sweeping stories that have the kind of grandeur of setting that westerns always seem to have, with enjoyable characters and interesting and intersecting storylines.
It’s been a while since I read Red Rabbit, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about it. However, it was a very enjoyable book written in third person omniscient, which is a style that I don’t see a lot of in modern horror. I enjoy this style a lot because I think that the novel is best supported by a multitude of storylines which intersect and shape each other.
Red Rabbit follows a witch hunter by the name of Old Tom, who is on his way to Burden County to collect the bounty on a witch by the name of Sadie Grace. Along the way, Old Tom has saved and adopted a young girl by the name of Rabbit and picked up a pair of cowboys named Ned and Moses as traveling companions. When they stay at Rose Nettles house, a recent widow, she decides that, since she has nothing left keeping her where she is, that she should travel with them to help care for Rabbit. But the young girl isn’t what she appears to be and the simple journey the group is on is anything but.
Rose of Jericho continues to follow Moses, Rose, Sadie, and Rabbit in their lives and adventures. Moses has married Katie and settled down on a farm, his adventuring days at an end. But when an illness leads to her untimely death, grief and love drive Moses to track down the Angel of Death itself. By a miracle both beautiful and terrible, Moses kills Death, leaving the dead to walk the earth, unable to pass on to the next step in the journey.
The world of these stories had already blurred the lines between life and death, so a world without Death took a little effort on my part to buy into the stakes of the story. In Red Rabbit, there were tons of ghosts, one of whom was Joe, the recently deceased husband of Rose, who follows her on her journey and plays a significant role to the story’s resolution. The rules for ghosts seemed to connect the spirit to where the bodies were, with the exception of Joe. Unfortunately, it’s been too long and I can’t remember what makes Joe the exception (outside of the love he has for Rose), or why some of the dead are shown to remain as spirits while some aren’t. But let’s just say death has never necessarily been the end for characters in this world.
Honestly, as much as I enjoyed Rose of Jericho, I didn’t fully understand or really buy into the stakes of the story. After killing Death, Moses realizes the implications of what he’s done and undertakes a journey to find Rose and, more importantly, the witch, Sadie Grace. Without being able to pass on, the spirits of the dead stay in and animate their bodies, regardless of how mangled those bodies are. The undead also have an unreasoning fury at the living, like the zombie trope but without the cannibalism. Obviously, this presents a problem. But the stakes aren’t presented until about halfway through the narrative, revealing Moses’ journey as one of transferring the duties of the Angel of Death to a new vessel, with angels and demons seeming to play the narrative like a chess match with the various characters as pieces on the board.
I think I could have enjoyed the story without the meta-story of Alexander, an angel, versus Bell, a demon (?), mostly because it made the ending feel very deus ex machina for me.
There are so many characters in Rose of Jericho that there’s a dramatis personae at the beginning of the book. I skimmed over it but never referred back to it while I was reading the story, because I’d honestly forgotten about it. Speaking of characters, we spend a lot of time with characters other than Rose, Moses, Sadie, or Rabbit, to the point that, as I neared the end of the story, I realized that I wanted more from it; more of the characters that made this story a sequel, more of what happened to them in the ten years between Red Rabbit and Rose of Jericho, just more in general.
The edition of Rose of Jericho I have clocks in at around three hundred and fifty pages, about one hundred pages less than my edition of Red Rabbit. I’m not saying that length equals quality. Maybe it’s a testament to the world and characters that Grecian has built that I wanted more. But it also felt like the story wasn’t really complete.
This may come down to narrative style. Even though I like Grecian’s style that brings in different character perspectives and storylines, I feel that he doesn’t spend enough time with the characters in their heads. There’s a lack of reflection by the characters about what’s happening in the story or what their lives have been like the last ten years. Here, I specifically mean Rose, Sadie, and Rabbit. Again, this could be indicative of my buy in to those characters, but I felt that they were oddly absent from the narrative while characters like Ben and his mother Clarissa, Lucy and her father Prosper got the bulk of the narrative.
Rereading my review here before I hit “publish,” you could read it like I didn’t like Rose of Jericho. I did, but I think that I enjoyed Red Rabbit more. One being the sequel of the other, it’s hard not to compare them. I can definitely recommend them both and I will definitely buy the next one, if there is one. I’ll also probably loop back and buy Grecian’s other books. I try to be careful with terms like “favorite,” but he’s definitely up there from writers I’ve discovered recently.
