I listened to the audiobook version of this, and Stefan Rudnick's narration is superb. It is amazing he can be so good given how crude some of Lansdale's descriptions and humor are! As for the book, being Lansdale, it has its moments. In his introduction, he warns us that it is pulp fiction; in other words, don't expect any deep meanings here. The protagonist in the overlong novel that forms the first half of the book and the shorter stories that follow is the Reverend Jebediah Mercer, a man "on a mission from God" to fight against evil, which seems to always take the form of man-eating creatures of one type or another. The book suffers significantly from its repetitiveness. Each story places the reverend in some godforsaken Western town (they may all be in Texas) populated for the most part with worthless people, who are faced with evil of the transcendent man-eating sort. Only the reverend, with his trusty armory, knows how to deal with it. By the end of each story, it isn't only the evil creatures who are annihilated--if you aren't the reverend himself, your chances of survival, whether you are a man, woman, or the reverend's horse, are pretty slim.

The most interesting part of the story is the reverend's take on god. Christian items, such as pages from the bible, do have an effect on the evil, but the reverend, while acknowledging he is doing the work of god, has no respect for him. It is the old testament god here, who takes delight in pain and suffering. In these stories, mankind is just god's plaything, about whom he ultimately cares less than nothing. Kudos to Lansdale here for managing to work religious power into the stories without accepting the biblical story as it has been propagandized for centuries.

These stories were written quickly. Lansdale admits that in a couple of them he used the wrong last name for the reverend entirely! He has revised this version to fix things like that and, apparently following Stephen King's writing advice, to get rid of a lot of adverbs and other ways of saying "said". I would not recommend this to anyone except a reader who really loves Lansdale and will put up with just about anything. ( )