3.5 stars with a bullet.

A weird-west, cultivation, gunslinger progression fantasy isn’t a thing I had thought about reading. But it turned out to be pretty entertaining.

The book has its problems: the writing, especially internal dialogue, is rather clunky. The first-person narrative is a bit distracting. and the audiobook narration has issues that occasionally took me out of the story.

The plot is decent: the mentor of the protagonist is killed by a group of criminals when the protagonist is in his teens and that protagonist swears out revenge on the whole group. This book covers the hunt for the first of those criminals. (Regrettably, the mentor is not named Johnny Diamond and the protagonist isn’t Alan Bourdillion Traherne.)

The book is set in a post-Civil-War US West where the guns shoot magic bullets and the gunslingers are elemental cultivators. The MC, unsurprisingly, has a special talent for magic, but the inciting death interrupted his training, which drives a significant part of the story. The magic system hangs together pretty well and makes the story more interesting.

Being a first-person narrative, we get the most detail about the protagonist, who has anger issues (perhaps exacerbated by his elemental affinity). For most of the book, he is portrayed largely as personified vengeance. But toward the end, we start to get bits and pieces that hint of the a larger story.

The villains are caricatured and mostly disposable, though there is one character is obviously intended to be recurring. The supporting characters are better realized, but they tend toward one trick each. (And two of them fill very similar niches.)

The narration is multi-person, but not full cast, which I didn’t much like, and some of the sound effects seemed gratuitous. I like all of the narrators, but together they were weaker than their individual skills would suggest.

All of which might suggest that I didn’t like the book. But the unique subject and the writing kept my attention in a way that I find a bit surprising. There’s currently only one book out, but I’m looking forward to book 2 in the series.