Marcus Pelegrimas

Mortician and ‘Man With A Past’ Nick Graves rides into the town of Jessup, Nebraska and is immediately accosted by a would-be robber. The stick-up man winds up dead and Nick discovers that the man was a deputy.

This is just the beginning of Marcus Pelegrimas’ (writing as Marcus Galloway) entertaining western The Man from Boot Hill. The plot quickly becomes complicated, bringing in the corrupt sheriff’s department and a mysterious stranger who is living in the town’s jail.

Despite what I’ve written above, The Man from Boot Hill isn’t one of those westerns that reads more like a mystery. This is a western through and through. The plot is generally advanced at the point of a gun rather than by stumbled upon clues.

Nick Graves (don’t worry, the too cute surname is explained in the prologue) was an interesting character. Though he’s as handy with a gun as any other western hero, there’s a humility about him that is unusual for the stereotype. I don’t want to say that he’s soft, as he is not in any way. But he at least comes across as someone who could function in a town. He doesn’t automatically punch/shoot anyone that crosses his path and at the same time is not portrayed as a saint.

We get snippets of Nick’s checkered past sprinkled through the course of the novel, though this being the first book in a series, not everything is revealed. That's to be expected of course, but I wonder if maybe a little too much was left out. At one point Nick mentions that his past will never leave him alone. Yet all that we have been told about his past was resolved by the end of the book. Maybe just a mention of others seeking vengeance against him would have helped me understand why he feels so hunted.

In the previous books of his that I’d read I noticed that Marcus Pelegrimas is weak in describing action scenes and that is the case here. For instance, there is a vital (and violent) confrontation that takes place in an alley. Often in the description of the close quarters fistfights, things would get muddled. I think he may be trying to describe too many fine details in his brawls, making them clunky to read.

The book runs about four hundred pages and the pace is somewhat leisurely. It doesn't ever feel like it is dragging or padded, but whittling down the page count would probably have helped tighten things up making the book more of a page turner.

Still, I did like the book overall. It wasn’t as good as the last western I’d read by this author: Death of a Bad Man, but was an enjoyable read anyway. I have picked up the rest of the series and will read them. And I have to give an extra half a star to any western that manages to wrap up its story with a duel.… (more)

I'm not sure why I picked up this book. I usually avoid series books like the plague. I guess seeing it was a horror novel by a first time writer* helped me overcome my doubts (and the super-pulpy cover promised lots of fun).

Anyhow, I'm glad I picked up the book. The Skinners series is action/horror, very similar to Blade or Underworld. There's not a lot of real originality in Blood Blade, but the book is entertaining nonetheless (and I do have to give Marcus Pelegrimas credit for crafting a unique spin on vampires).

In an opening that is very reminiscent of Algernon Blackwood's The Wendigo, video game designer Cole Warnecki decides to take a vacation in the Canadian wilderness when he and his party are attacked by a gigantic creature.

This leads him to a loosely organized group called The Skinners who secretly protect 'the normal world' from vampires, werewolves and assorted supernatural beasties.

While there's nothing especially new here, Marcus Pelegrimas is a very good pulp writer. The book flowed right along, never dragging and not taking itself too seriously. There is a good dose of humor here. At times the book is very funny, though never so slapstick that it hurts the story.

He has a good ear for dialogue which is believable (well, in a T.V. show kind of way) and snappy. Most of the characters are pretty flat, with no real depth or history being given for any of them, but Cole is at least sketched out enough that you can empathize with him. Hopefully the other characters will gain a little more background/motivation in future books.

I do think the author needs to work on his action scenes. It's important that they be well written in a book like this, but I thought that in this book the description of the action was kind of muddy. Also, he never actually described what Cole looked like. I just assumed that he looked like the guy on the cover, but it did bug me as I read the book.

I hope in future books he goes into a little more explanation of how the Skinners work as an organization. It all seemed very vague and chaotic here, though since Cole is sort of brought in while he was under fire, that may have been intentional.

So there's not a lot that's new here, but I did enjoy the book enough to keep reading the series. While it isn't a whole lot more than a distillation of a bunch of stuff we've seen before, the personality of the writing makes it worth a read.

*I was wrong there. He turned out a bunch of westerns under the pen name Marcus Galloway. At least that explains why the writing was so polished in this 'first novel'… (more)