“All good scientists are from Missouri: in other words, they should continually be saying, ‘Show me’.”

73. Unbury Carol – Josh Malerman

“Hell’s heaven” was uttered so, so, so many times that it distracted me from the plot. Everyone says it. The husband, the sheriff, the assassin, the outlaw, Rinaldo, the helper girl, the funeral director, some guy…I’m not entirely exaggerating. As we know, if something distracts me so much that I lead with it, I may not be entirely complimentary to the story.

One thing I will say, I believe Malerman spent a lot of time organizing the world he wanted to portray and yes, the Western can be a repetitive genre. Hell’s heaven.

There were definitely a lot of concepts that deserved a less distracting phrase interruption than “Hell’s heaven” or, the other one, “Shudders.” We have a greedy husband with a wife who has a condition where she looks dead but can still hear everything going on around her – and she’s rich. We have that wife’s lost love who totally screwed up – James Moxie, who went on to become a very famous outlaw and holed up on the other end of the “Trail” from where Miss Not Dead Carol lives.

We have an important journey, a very austere inventor mother who really comes through in an unexpected way, and an assassin with an interesting method of walking and he’s so evil he doesn’t even need a hat. And then there’s Rot, the fantastical character who continues to lead the good characters astray to hopeless places and the bad characters to what they need. I’m still not sure how I felt about that character and whether or not he was really necessary. At the end I definitely felt like he was just butting in randomly to delay the plot and it would’ve been tighter if he hadn’t. He definitely got in the way of the main scene that really needed to be there for the title character. Show, don’t tell, Malerman. Hell’s heaven.

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Ozma’s distinctive face makes her a guinea pig of certain distinction on any and all trails. She’s a sweet little legend in her own right.