Reviews

Haxan by Kenneth Mark Hoover

testpattern's review against another edition

2.0

Okay, whatever. Good enough to bother finishing, so long as you don't mind mentally editing as you go along. I guess it is a fun premise, sort of a mashup of The Highlander, High Plains Drifter, and Moorcock's Eternal Champion. The prose is largely poor, the characters are tissue thin, and the overall structure is rather unbalanced. It reads like a fix-up. Do people still do those?

the_original_shelf_monkey's review

5.0

John T. Marwood is a man only a name change away from classic “man with no name” status. The new marshal of the town of Haxan, New Mexico, Marwood is a taciturn gunslinger with a past as murky as a dust storm. Tasked with keeping the peace, Marwood soon discovers the town is as brutal a place as any he has encountered. Throughout the pages, Hoover dollops out hints on Marwood’s shady past (hints I hope to be resolved in future entries in the series), but he takes great pains to keep his anti-hero as dark a soul as his enemies. There are also the inklings of a supernatural mysticism that heightens Marwood’s every decision. Haxan is not a genteel examination of the West; it’s a mean, vicious, bloody, profane look at hard people living hard times. Not for nothing has it been described as “Lonesome Dove meets The Punisher.” But goddamn is it a good read.

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