133 pages
Published 2021
Read from October 13 to October 14
Rating: 2.5 out of 5
Some spoilers ahead.
There are bits and pieces of a brilliant story here. A lone drifter comes to a remote desert town, drawn irresistibly by fragments of memories that haunt her. A doctor lives alone outside of town, bringing her patients back to life with a kiss. Bodies turn up in the hills nearby, bloated with spiders, rotting into fungus. Strange white-skinned beings lurk in the desert. When the drifter regains her memories, we learn she is in fact over three hundred years old, a survivor from a place once called California. In short, the vibes are immaculate.
Unfortunately, the Weird Western vibes get buried under a mess of way too much exposition. This brief novella crams in a little bit of everything: Egyptian mythology, a 1930s socialite in search of immortality, medical experiments, a river of the dead, a bone plague that ended the world we know. It doesn't really cohere into a whole; none of the backstory really adds to my initial enjoyment. I think a lighter touch, an air of mysteries never explained, would have carried this story far. As it is, it's a jumble, fragments of unrealized brilliance buried in a busy matrix.
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