In Lila Bowen’s western/fantasy/horror mash-up Wake of Vultures, Nettie Lonesome is many things. She is a character whose gender and race are fluid, she is treated as a slave by her adoptive parents, and this is before her encounter with a strange creature in the barn on the property where she lives. At her core, Nettie is a cranky, no-nonsense cowpoke who is a reluctant hero. She’s half black, half Native American and finds herself straddling the supernatural and natural worlds throughout much of the novel.
At the start of the novel, Nettie is a slave in all but name to her foster parents, and she isn’t too happy with them or her situation. They treat her horribly and she has no recompense. When a strange creepy fellow arrives on their farm, and Nettie fights for her life until she manages to defeat the creature making it dissolve into black sand, Nettie has an awakening. She can see things that normal people are unable to see. She leaves her home to join the Double TK Ranch where she poses as a boy and her considerable skill at breaking horses gives her the acceptance, friendship, and value-recognition she needs and deserves. In parallel to that, a Skinwalker (shapechanger) named Coyote Dan befriends her and helps Nettie come to grips with her new supernatural life. She can see vampires, witches and all sort of supernatural and weird entities. Dan sets her up with the Texas Rangers who combat these baddies. When Nettie was first sucked into the weird world, she became entangled with Pia Mupitsi, a monstrous child thief and Coyote Dan acts as a mentor to her through much of the story as Nettie comes to grips with how she fits into this new world she sees.
It is an open secret that Lila Bowen is actually Delilah Dawson, who moved up in the alphabet with this pseudonym. I’ve read a couple of Delilah’s novels and one of her greatest strengths is her voice as a writer, it is powerful and envelops the reader with each story and as Lila in Wake of Vultures this powerful voice is no different. She immediately builds a great deal of empathy and sympathy for Nettie before she becomes, effectively, a monster-hunting cowpoke. As Nettie leaves the place where she grew up and becomes part of the wider world, this empathy allows the reader to get into her head very effectively. Although she dresses as a man to work, Nettie finds herself attracted to both men and women which poses a bit of an issue when she finds herself drawn to another cowpoke, who also happens to be a neighbor from her life before she killed the vampire. It is an awkward situation, but Lila/Delilah handles it with a deft balance of humor and honesty to offset the awkwardness. In other words, it feels real. In a story involving skinwalkers, witches, and vampires, those fantastical elements will have less weight and plausibility if the characters don’t feel real. For her unabashed individuality, vibrant and unwavering belief in herself despite any gender, race, or supernatural labels, Nettie (or Nat) is as living and breathing a protagonist as I’ve met in Fantasy.
Another element I appreciated about Wake of Vultures, and this goes hand in hand with the “realness” of the protagonist, is the honest, unwavering nature of the entire narrative. Bowen doesn’t shy away from the bloody scenes, the difficult character scenes, the challenging themes and topics. In short, Wake of Vultures is a brave, bold novel of human truth set against a dark, magical backdrop. It is perfectly paced and engaging from start to finish.
Wake of Vultures takes the wide open expanse of the Wild West and adds to it the mystical and mythical elements of Native American peoples for a fantastic Weird Western novel. I’m very pleased that the number “1” adorns the spine just under The Shadow because that means we’ll be seeing more of Lila Bowen’s wonderful Nettie/Nat Lonesome and her journeys.
© 2015 Rob H. Bedford
Highly Recommended.
Orbit, October 2015
Hardcover, 352 Pages | ISBN: 978-0-316-26431-0
The Shadow #1
http://www.whimsydark.com/
Review copy courtesy of the publisher, Orbit Books
Good review, Rob. Really enjoyed this book.