Josh Rountree was born in 1973 and is a US author who began publishing work of genre interest with “Fool’s Tile” in Glyph in December 2002. He emerged from the short fiction trenches, with more than seventy of his stories published in venues including The Deadlands, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Bourbon Penn, Realms of Fantasy, PseudoPod, Weird Horror, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. He lives in the greater Austin, Texas, metropolitan area with his lovely wife of many years and a pair of half-feral dogs who command his obedience. As reviewed on this site previously, his debut novel, The Legend of Charlie Fish, established his “Weird West” universe to wide acclaim, and The Unkillable Frank Lightning returns to that same haunted territory — deeper, darker, and with its claws more firmly set. Old West Frankenstein, brought to life.
Where the other entries on this list deal in dread that seeps like cold water through stone, Rountree’s Gothic Western blazes with the fire of the grotesque. In 1879, Private Frank Humble, Catherine’s husband, was killed in a Sioux attack. Consumed by grief, she used her formidable skills to resurrect him. But Frank lost his soul after the reanimation, and disappeared after a killing spree. Frankenstein, then — but Frankenstein dragged through dust and gunsmoke, stripped of European propriety, left to roam the blasted American frontier.
Catherine enlists a pair of outlaws to help her track Frank down, but a drunken shoot-out compels her to attempt another arcane resurrection, drawing the wrath of a conservative frontier town. The novel alternates between 1879 and 1905, stitching together the original sin and its long, poisonous aftermath. Like all the best Gothic, it is fundamentally a story about what creators owe their creations, and what the abandoned monstrous thing does in the dark without them.
Bookpage called it “like Elmore Leonard by way of Mary Shelley.” That’s apt, but Rountree’s sensibility is distinctly his own — equal parts carnage and tenderness, with a frontier landscape that feels mythic and cursed rather than merely historical. The creature at its center is not a symbol but a wound, still open, still walking, still searching for the woman who made him and then ran.
