Run, Rabbit, Run-Reading Alex Greican’s “Red Rabbit”

There’s powerful, totemic magic at play here. Devils walk the earth, ghouls consume men alive, and you’d better be careful of any strangers you meet alone on a dusty Kansas trail. You see, Samuel Colt’s peacemaker may have made men equal, but it only made men equal with each other, not with the more ancient things that still stalk the Earth.

Alex Grecian’s “Red Rabbit” is a thrilling “Weird West” where Witches curse men and Witchmasters, some canny, and others… less canny, hunt them. At the opening of Alex’s novel, a bounty has been placed on the enigmatic Sadie Grace, a young but powerful witch in Riddle, Kansas to the tune of one-thousand Dollars. A nearly unimaginable sum for a book set both in the years following the Civil War and in a genre most well-known for the trope of a handful of men killing each other over 10s of dollars.  An elderly Witchmaster, Tom Collins, and his very young mute ward, Rabbit, so named for their propensity to flee from danger, aim to capture that princely sum. In their pursuit, they unintentionally recruit Rose Nettles a former schoolteacher and widowed farmer’s wife as a form of caretaker for Rabbit, who doggedly refuses to let Tom continue on with the child alone.  

On their journey the trio will encounter and look to recruit a wide cast of characters ranging from the mundane to the mysterious in this task. “Seven is a powerful number,” and though, in this novel, the 7 is less “magnificent” and more “macabre,” the novel carefully and painstakingly sets up western trope after western trope only to interestingly or cleverly subvert them in a horror context as our group of unlikely protagonists encounter obstacle after obstacle on this “hero’s journey.” Each leaves them with greater and greater questions and fewer and fewer answers about just how heroic that journey really will be in the end.

Precise and delicately planned out, Grecian carefully weaves a narrative of plans. Everybody in the novel has a plan for themselves and plans for what they encounter, and those plans more often go awry than well, hero or villain alike, making for nail-biting  and exciting encounters. The novel, true to its promises of the Horror genre, makes it clear early that nobody is safe. Stories that initially seem disconnected slowly knit themselves together into a taut, finely-crafted, and sophisticated tapestry of a narrative, replete with a powerful and satisfying resolution. The novel is a little plodding in one or two sections but rewards the patience of its reader generously.

“Weird West” is one of my favorite genres relative to how little gets published or produced within it. It’s really quite a shame. The long and perilous expanse of the American west makes for some mighty fine ghost stories.