Lincoln Crisler

“Tales of a High Planes Drifter” is a collection of four novella-length tales featuring the Merkabah Rider and his adventures in the 19th-century American West. The Rider himself is reminiscent of no one more than Stephen King’s Roland of Gilead; a gunman with conviction, who is prepared to kill but still has lines he won’t cross. Dropping an Hasidic Jew into the Wild West is a pretty gutsy move, but it just might make this one of the genre’s standout books this year.

Not only is the Rider a gunslinger, he’s also a potent Qabbalist (one skilled in the secret arts of Hebrew mysticism; seals of Solomon and the like) capable of astral travel and creating magical talismans. He uses his many talents in a series of battles against bigotry, attackers both supernatural and mundane, and his own tortured conscience.

The general thread woven throughout the stories in the book is that of a man, betrayed by his master, seeking justice in the name of his fallen brethren. In the course of the Rider’s search for the traitorous Adon he takes on a bloodthirsty cult (“The Blood Libel”), a group of bandits in league with a voodoo bokor (“The Dust Devils”), a demon-possessed, grief-stricken father and husband (“Hell’s Hired Gun”), and a cathouse staffed by the daughters of Lilith (“The Nightjar Women”).

Erdelac is a self-proclaimed history enthusiast, and “Tales of a High Planes Drifter” is packed with what must have been a staggering amount of research into Jewish history and mysticism. His descriptive skills are top-notch and he exhibits particular skill at knowing when to throw in a bit of extra gore. The second book comes out this fall, which only adds to the win.

Originally appeared on Shroud Magazine’s Book Review Blog.

Dubaku is a short (40-someodd pages), fast-paced horror story set on a 1790′s slave ship. The protagonist, for whom the book is named, surrenders himself willingly to slavers in the hope of rejoining his wife, who had been sold into slavery by her own people as punishment for her marriage to Dubaku. A couple weeks packed into the ship’s hold with hundreds of sick, malnourished, abused and dying slaves awakens him to a harsh reality: none of them are likely to survive, and his chances of rejoining his beloved are slim to none. He is spurred to action, either by spirits or his own twisted sense of justice, and the horrfying results aren’t all that great for the ship’s crew, or the slaves for that matter.

Erdelac’s novella is expertly written, but for one small infodump near the beginning that probably could have been spread out a bit over the first half of the book. He does an excellent job of describing the misery of the slaves, the cruelty of the ship’s crew and the greed of the ship’s captain. The various indignities visited upon the slaves and Dubaku in particular are recorded in detail; I give Erdelac a lot of credit for choosing such an emotionally-charged setting and not shying away from the grim facts of one of mankind’s darkest hours. The crown jewel of the book is Dubaku himself, a powerful African shaman from a family steeped in magic. At the beginning of the book he stands tall and proud, assured of his mission’s success. He rapidly devolves into a man awakened to the truth of his situation, and he makes some dark choices that make it hard to consider him a hero by any stretch of the imagination. Whatever you think of Dubaku (the man) after reading Dubaku (the book), you can’t argue with the logic behind his decisions: the slaves were doomed from the start, and those bastard slavers definitely had it coming.

4.5/5. I already have Erdelac’s next work in queue and can’t wait to get to it.