The Good, The Bad, and the Infernal

The Good the Bad and the Infernal by Guy Adams
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

The town of Wormwood appears once every 100 years and is said to be a gateway to Heaven. This time, it's scheduled to appear in the Midwest and several groups seek it, including a crooked preacher with a brain damaged "messiah," a freak show, and an aging gunfighter and his sidekick. Will any of them reach Wormwood alive? And what will they find when they get there?

I think I picked this book up at the wrong time because it definitely had all the winning Weird Western ingredients. Gunfighters with mysterious pasts, crazy inventors, crooked preachers, and creepy crawly creatures. I liked the Wormwood concept and the characters were a very interesting mix.

It may have been the shifting viewpoints that killed it for me. If it had stuck to one group of characters on the road to Wormwood, I probably would have found it much more gripping. It was one of those books that I enjoyed but wasn't compelled to forsake all other things to read it. I'm a pretty fast reader but it took me over a week to get through this.

That's not to say I hated it. I'm pretty sure it was a timing issue. Knowing there were two more books in the series may have also curbed my enthusiasm. I'll have to give it a re-read at some time in the future when I'm in the right mood for it.

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