My Goodreads review: The Unheld

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The Unheld: A Novel by Luke Larkin

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Luke Larkin's The Unheld is an ambitious weird Western set in the Montana Territory, with effective atmospherics and a genuinely different monster. This last is accompanied by a blight on nature, producing out-of-sync seasons and malformed creatures reminiscent of Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space." Unfortunately, the structure of this novel isn't nearly as tight as that classic work. Though the action seldom slows, plot points sometimes fail to connect convincingly.

The main viewpoint character, young Charlie /Charlotte Webber, lives with her hunter father on the edge of Plainsend, a struggling community transformed by the building of the transcontinental railroad. Her father's livelihood is being destroyed by the blight. Charlie feels trapped -- both by her circumstances and by a father who apparently blames her for her mother's death in childbirth.. When a mysterious Easterner interested in the corrupted wildlife arrives in town, Charlie tries to interest him in her father's unsalable trophies. Soon enough, there's a new trophy -- captured alive -- that the Easterner decidedly does want.

Meanwhile, an exiled member of the Cheyenne tribal police is also tracking this trophy, whom he blames for his brother's disappearance. When Charlie's Pa vanishes as well, she must join forces with the Easterner Theodore (a member of a shadowy Society devoted to esoteric knowledge) and the Cheyenne Patton to recover him. This involves a confusing number of flashbacks and a lot of blood, plus more body horror than this reader was expecting. The ending is particularly surreal.

I wanted to like this one more than I did, and I did like Charlie herself very much. I had more trouble with the number of supporting characters, the back stories that never got resolved, and a general feeling that all the plot pieces weren't fitting together. In particular, we never find out how the main creature is producing the array of monstrosities and seasonal aberrations. However, there's a lot of imagination and heart (particularly on the subject of loneliness) here; and the writing itself is polished. Weird Western fans with a taste for the cosmic might want to give it a try.

My thanks to NetGalley and Hyperion Avenue for ARC.




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