Review: The Majestic by Keith C. Blackmore

The Majestic 311 by Keith C. Blackmore

I think this novel had one of the best blurbs promoting it that I have ever read, but I don’t think the novel lived up to its blurb. It wasn’t that the blurb was dishonest, it’s that the book took a large number of turns that felt “out of the spirit” of the blurb to me. The basic plot, as laid out in that blurb, is that in 1903 a 13-car train dubbed The Majestic 311 disappeared while going through a tunnel under the Rockies and 7 years later, train robbers mistakenly scramble onto the 311 when it appears in place of the locomotive they are waiting for. What I expected to follow was a horror mystery regarding how those outlaws come to understand where they were and finally manage to get off the train again. Technically, all of that happens, but in the middle of it are half a dozen excursions to other worlds that frankly quickly became highly tiresome and never seemed to be truly connected to the train. Instead of investigating the train and its mystery, most of the novel focuses on our train robbers exploring (albeit unwillingly) other worlds and that just never caught my attention. The little bits that focused on the Majestic 311 itself were pretty good, but they are truly a very small part of the overall novel.