The Ten Thousand Things

The Ten Thousand Things by Tim Marquitz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Nina Weaver and company are riding the rails and Lao Xu's hell train is right behind them. Can they stop the train full of Deaduns before it catches them? And even then, can they elude Lao Xu?

Step aboard the cliche train for a moment. The Ten Thousand Things is Those Poor, Poor Bastards on steroids with the volume turned up to eleven. Nina and company go out of the frying pan and into the fire so many times they should have burn marks on their asses.

Ahem... The Ten Thousand Things is the second book in the Dead West series, currently slated as a sextology. Heh, sex. Anyway, these books are so action-packed they're exhausting to read at times. Lots of Deaduns get killed and the good guys take a world-class shit-kicking. The gore level is pretty high.

The writing group of Soward, Marquitz, and Martin deliver the goods. I've grown to care about the Daggett brothers, miserable assholes they may be, as well as the rest of the cast. Nina continues taking steps toward her destiny and the rest of the characters prove to be more multifaceted than originally suspected. I'm getting really excited about the final confrontation with Lao Xu and it's likely still several installments away.

I don't have many bad things to say about this series so far. I expected a higher body count among the main cast in this one but I'm sure a few of them will drop like flies in the next installment. Much like the last book, there's a gag-inducing part near the end, this time involving a worm the size of a whiskey bottle pulled out of someone's head.

If you like weird westerns prominently featuring zombies, give this one a shot. The guys at Ragnarok Publications are good people and they know how to spin a yarn. Four out of five stars.

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