THE COMING OF CROW
By Joel Jenkins
Pulpwork Press
305 pages
For ever reviewer, there are always books we cannot read fast enough because, not only do we personally enjoy them so much, but because we also can’t wait to share them with our fellow readers. This is such a book.
Joel Jenkins is among the elite of the new pulp fiction writers working today. Like most prolific scribes, he has several different series available to pulp fans. Of all of them, my favorite is hands down the weird western stories he’s done featuring his wonderful character, Lone Crow. Crow is the last of his tribe; they were all butchered by a renegade band of Apaches. Crow’s travels take him all over the North and South America, from the freezing rugged Alaskan frontier to the thick, hot cloying jungles of Brazil. Wherever there is some strange mystery dealing with the occult, you are bound to find this Indian gunfighter making an appearance. And when he does, look out! Then the action kicks up a notch and it’s blessed bullets against all manner of beasts and monsters.
“The Coming of Crow” contains fourteen of Crow’s amazing adventures; a few having been previously published in other anthologies over the past few years. That I’d already read some of these before didn’t bother me in the least, as having bound together in one glorious collection is the treasure here. Another fanciful element of many of Jenkins’ Lone Crow stories is that he peppers them with historical western figures. Among these accounts, Crow crosses paths with the likes of Wyatt Earp, Bass Reeves, Shotgun Ferguson and many other colorful western legends.
If you are a fan of weird westerns, then your library isn’t complete until you have this book in it. I was happy to see Jenkins purposely labeled it Volume One which means he has a lot more Lone Crow stories coming our way and this reviewer couldn’t be any happier about that.
