Book Reviews: A Monster-Wild West Mashup Fails

 Melinda West, Monster Gunslinger, by KC Grifant (Bridgid’s Gate Press)

I’m a softie for mash-ups like Jane Austen with supernatural creatures or, in this case, the Wild West with monsters. Throw in a strong, competent woman protagonist and you get a fun read, one in which I’m willing to overlook a lot. I won’t insist on peerless prose or immaculately consistent worldbuilding in a “fast, fun read” novel.

Melinda West, Monster Gunslinger had a great deal going for it, starting with a landscape inhabited by a slew of weird, wildly creative monsters (giant flying scorpions, psychic bugs, things with made-up names). All the creatures seem bent on mayhem, leaving me to wonder whatever happened to the herbivorous varieties, but such details are not essential in “fun, fast read” Monsters-in-Wild West tales. At the outset, I found the easy banter between Melinda and her partner, Lance, appealing, as they offer their services to desperate settlers beset by the aforementioned monsters.

Therein lay the first of several elements that kicked me out of the story. I lost sympathy for Melinda (and Lance, but mostly Melinda) when a wave of scorpion-monsters emerges from a mine and begins to swarm. Melinda demands payment from the sheriff of the beleaguered town. As in, right now or they’ll let the creatures do their worst. We call bullying vulnerable folks “punching down,” and it’s not okay in a sympathetic character. As it turned out, the sheriff had the payment ready, but what if he hadn’t? Would Melinda and Lance let the town be destroyed? Were they in it only for the money? I found this exploitative moment so off-putting, I never re-connected with the characters.

Following this, there’s a lot of dialog about getting together enough money to retire (someplace without monsters), a reunion, and the beginning of a quest that is no more believable than anything else in this world. By this time, the inconsistencies in worldbuilding, emotional distance from the characters, and amateurish prose turned continued reading into a slog. The prose occasionally rose to the level of adequate but was all too often clunky, pretentious, and laced with emotional manipulation of the reader. As I said, I can put up with a lot for the sake of a “fun, fast” story. I rolled my eyes at, “They continued upwards, the horses losing steam while they stomped through the snow mounds,” but kept going (these are normal horses, not mechanical, btw, and I leave it to you to imagine a horse stomping through snow). Here’s the line that caused me to stop reading: “His face hung grimmer than she had ever seen.”

Of course, YMMV.