The thing about speculative fiction is that all the different branches of it go together so well that half the time you can’t even tell them apart. Is Star Wars sci-fi or fantasy, or both? Is my own Ad Luna purely SF or pretty much just space-F? Because all these genres hinge on ‘what-ifs’, on distortions of the real world – and so they also combine beautifully with conventional genres, and in such combinations you will find some of the best books you’ve ever read. Mix a tense political thriller with space opera and you get A Memory Called Empire. Throw some dragons into a police procedural and you get the Rivers of London series.

Stick some eldritch happenings into the Wild West, and you get His Ragged Company by Rance D. Denton. Now unlike those previous examples, when you hear the words ‘Lovecraftian western’, they don’t seem to go naturally together. But they do. They really do.

Elias Faust is the grizzled marshal of a grizzled town in the arse-end of nowhere, otherwise known as Blackpeak, Texas. He spends his time trying not to shoot drunken miners and petty criminals, which is a difficult task when much of Blackpeak’s population seems to have dedicated their time to spitting in the eye of Faust’s rough and ready version of the law. Faust is stretched thin trying to keep the peace, stretched thinner when organised crime and hate groups begin rearing their heads nearby, stretched to breaking-point when the people in power, who he’s meant to be enforcing the law for, become the ones who seem most bent on tearing it down. He’s a pragmatic, weary man with far too big a job to do, at once sick of violence and finding himself resorting to it time and again, and I would enjoy reading his story if that was it: if it was just the tale of a small-town marshal in the American west trying to keep his town together.

But His Ragged Company is more than that. Because some of those criminals take a lot more bullets than they should to bring down. Because that ‘lucky bullet’ really does seem to do something, though you couldn’t really call it ‘luck’. Because not all those scrawlings on the walls are just random doodles. Because that woman from out of town is from a long way out of town. Because slowly but surely, eerie event by event, Denton builds up far too much Weird Bollocks for Elias Faust to be able to entirely ignore. There is something in Blackpeak that is more than just dust and coal, more than just grim people and grim lives. There is something else, under the earth, and there are people who want it, and they will stop at nothing to get it, and it seems that the only one standing in their way is a tired marshal with less and less trust from his people – or in himself – by the day.

“Don’t believe them when they say [dying] doesn’t hurt… what they refuse to tell you is this: time, to pain and agony, knows no boundaries.”

It’s that slow build that really captured me when I read this book. Little things, that Faust explains away – that we as readers can see are too weird to be explained away, but that Faust’s narrative voice does so well at smoothing over, at ignoring until they can be ignored no more. As Denton’s protagonist slowly opened up to the strangeness of these goings on so did I.

It’s a masterclass in slowly raising the stakes, that is only marred by the very beginning of the book, which starts in media res, much as I did with The Blackbird and the Ghost: we kick off with Faust in the middle of some very definitely eldritch happenings from the end of the novel, and only then jump back to the beginning. And while it works, and sets a dark tone, I can’t help but wonder if it would have been better to just start at the start: with the first pair of criminals Faust faces down, with the first hints of something bigger and darker going on, to commit entirely to that slow build towards the truly fantastical events. I have received similar criticism for the start of Blackbird, and now, reading His Ragged Company, I see what that criticism was about. Would I change my own writing? Hell no. But I understand.

But that aside, His Ragged Company is excellent. Just because the end is hinted at the beginning doesn’t mean it’s not a beautifully written book. In fact – in counterpoint to myself – realising, chapter by chapter, what all those mysteries at the start meant, as one by one they were introduced, was great fun. There is so much more going on in Blackpeak than meets the eye. And I think that combination of hard-bitten western characters and the creeping darkness of Lovecraft-style eldritch horror really works: I could really buy how slow these people were to accept the supernatural, when their daily lives were so full of hardships to be shut out, when times were already bad enough.

I hope Denton gets around to a sequel, someday. I’d like to ride with Faust again. Because surely he’s managed to get himself on the wrong side of a lot more trouble by now.