In Extremis - Western Horror!!
Western horror has always been the kind of thing I can’t say no to. But if I’m being totally honest, I didn’t know In Extremis by Danielle Kaheaku was going to be a western horror book when I first looked at it. What got me interested in it right away was the cover. It just looked very creepy and very cool. That is what got the book on my radar. I did a little digging to see what the book was about and when I read it was western horror, I stopped looking into it. I was sold.
The story follows Catherine Blake a young woman who finds herself running her family farm and caring for her two younger brothers following the untimely death of their parents. Naturally, she is struggling to make ends meet for her small family until she meets a drifter who goes by the name of Cole. She hires him to help out on the farm in exchange for a place to live. Cole works well on the field and with the animals on the farm and things begin to turn around for the Blake’s. However, the corrupt Mayor is looking to push Catherine and her family off their land in order to open up the town to a new railroad. This will help make the town prosperous but will also make the Blake’s homeless. Catherine continues to refuse the aggressive advances of the mayor to buy her farm.
From there, the book takes a dark, unexpected turn. Cole, it turns out is not an ordinary man, but a reaper, walking the earth and helping souls cross over from this world to the next. And the Mayor is not simply using aggressive tactics to remove people from their land, he is also using a form of dark magic to summon demons to help his plan succeed. As the forces of evil grow more powerful, Catherine realizes the only person she can count on outside of her family, is the reaper whose been living with her the entire time.
The setting for this novel is perfect. As I said before, I’m a sucker for western horror and the Blake farm is the perfect spot to build some tension and set the table for some great action sequences at the end of the book. The descriptions of the farm were perfect, there wasn’t so much detail that I felt like Kaheaku was forcing the farm down my throat, instead she gave me just enough information to let my head fill in the blanks and I ended up with a beautiful and haunting setting for this dark, tragic tale.
For all of the paranormal events and characters in this book, it is the humans, mostly Catherine and her brothers that made the story for me. The paranormal stuff was great, and visceral and exciting but the human element makes the story worth reading.
If there was one aspect of this book that pulled me out of the narrative, and the blame does not land totally on the author for this, it was the editing of the digital version I read. There were repeated words and a few sentences that repeated themselves. However, I have to point out that these mistakes usually pull me out of the story enough that I stop reading and move on to something else. In this case however, I found the story compelling enough to continue in spite of these minor errors. Overall, a good work of horror fiction that earns a solid 3 out of 5 from me.
Don’t want to miss anything on the site? Sign up for our newsletter HERE
Want more spooky reads? Just search below:
