The Magpie Coffin - The Perfect Mix of Western and Horror
I don’t usually like to talk about books other than the one I’m reviewing in a book review, but I think this is a special circumstance. Three or four years ago I came across the novel A Congregation of Jackals by S. Craig Zahler and I absolutely loved it. I then found out he wrote another western titled Wraiths of the Broken Land and again, I loved it. These, as far as I can remember, were not billed as horror books but just as western books. They were also not considered splatter westerns, but they both most certainly are. They were dark and gruesome and I loved every page of both. At the time I tried to find more books like them with little success. I’m happy to announce that I’ve finally found a book that not only reminds me of those two original splatter western novels, but surpasses them.
The Magpie Coffin by Wile E. Young has everything you’re looking for in a western novel, and everything that you’re looking for in a horror novel. It is the perfect combination of the two and it works extremely well. In my opinion, this novel builds on the base that the two other novels mentioned above built. I don’t know if there are other western horror novels, I’m sure there are, but I haven’t read them.
In The Magpie Coffin, Young takes the traditional western story of revenge and flips it on its head by giving us a story about a man names Salem Covington who is on a killing rampage looking for the men who killed his teacher, an indigenous person that was killed by a group of men who are now scattered throughout the American west. Covington will stop at nothing to find and kill all of the men who had a hand in the killing of his teacher. But there is a horror twist to this story, Covington is in possession of a magic gun that will ensure he will not be killed by someone else’s gun as long as it remains in his possession.
Already the plot is awesome, but trust me, my short description doesn’t do this book justice. Covington doesn’t just want to kill these men, he wants to make them suffer and the ways in which he chooses to make them suffer get more gruesome and bloody with each turn of the page. The writing and descriptions are tremendous from beginning to end and as with any good horror story, you care about the characters to the point where you have no choice but to keep reading to find out what will happen to them.
The Magpie Coffin is a great introduction into the splatter western genre. In my opinion, it is the book by which all other western/horror mashups will be measured. It has the right amount of western grit and the perfect blend of paranormal and gore to make it a horror book at the same time. Do yourself a favor and seek this book out. You will not be disappointed.
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