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A review by kris_mccracken
Smoke Wagon by Brett Cogburn
2.0
Brett Cogburn’s “Smoke Wagon” is exactly what it promises: a loud, leathery western that kicks down the saloon doors, empties its revolver, and leaves the bartender to clean up the mess. It’s the literary equivalent of a spaghetti western marathon on a hungover Sunday. There’s grit, gunfire, and just enough smirking bravado to keep the tumbleweeds rolling, but don’t expect it to reinvent the wheel. Or even bother oiling it.
Morgan Clyde, the hero, strides through the carnage like a frontier Terminator. He’s shot, punched, and presumably concussed, yet manages to emerge from every scrap with little more than a poetic scratch. The villains, on the other hand, drop like they’ve been shot by cannons instead of six-shooters. It’s an endless parade of casualties that makes one wonder if the Old West had any men left to build railroads after all this carnage or if tumbleweeds started rolling just to avoid being gunned down.
The prose does try for realism, at least in its dialogue and commitment to physical detail. Characters spit, bleed, and groan with convincing anguish, though often just long enough to collapse in dramatic heaps while Morgan dusts himself off. Yet this realism stumbles against the cartoonish action sequences where bodies pile up faster than chairs in a closing pub. For all the mud and sweat, the novel never quite decides if it wants to be a hard-edged character study or a high-noon pantomime with villains twirling imaginary moustaches.
Speaking of clichés, Molly - the inevitable ‘hooker with a heart of gold’ - makes her entrance with the kind of tragic allure that suggests she was assembled in the same factory as every other brothel-dwelling love interest in Western fiction. She’s likeable, sure, but also the sort of character you could swap out for any other fictional Molly without losing much. And then there’s the supporting cast, a procession of faces that drift in, mumble a line, and evaporate. If Chekhov’s gun had this many redundancies, it’d be buried in the desert by chapter three.
The pacing drags like a three-legged mule thanks to Cogburn’s devotion to describing every hat, saddle, and grain of sand in vivid detail. The action, when it finally arrives, hits hard but never fast enough to make up for the long slogs in between.
As for the cliffhanger ending, it’s less a nail-biter and more a polite shove toward a sequel that I have no intention of reading. “Smoke Wagon” is fine if you like your westerns loud, familiar, and lightly soaked in testosterone. But for all its smoke and bravado, the gun never quite goes off.
⭐ ⭐
Morgan Clyde, the hero, strides through the carnage like a frontier Terminator. He’s shot, punched, and presumably concussed, yet manages to emerge from every scrap with little more than a poetic scratch. The villains, on the other hand, drop like they’ve been shot by cannons instead of six-shooters. It’s an endless parade of casualties that makes one wonder if the Old West had any men left to build railroads after all this carnage or if tumbleweeds started rolling just to avoid being gunned down.
The prose does try for realism, at least in its dialogue and commitment to physical detail. Characters spit, bleed, and groan with convincing anguish, though often just long enough to collapse in dramatic heaps while Morgan dusts himself off. Yet this realism stumbles against the cartoonish action sequences where bodies pile up faster than chairs in a closing pub. For all the mud and sweat, the novel never quite decides if it wants to be a hard-edged character study or a high-noon pantomime with villains twirling imaginary moustaches.
Speaking of clichés, Molly - the inevitable ‘hooker with a heart of gold’ - makes her entrance with the kind of tragic allure that suggests she was assembled in the same factory as every other brothel-dwelling love interest in Western fiction. She’s likeable, sure, but also the sort of character you could swap out for any other fictional Molly without losing much. And then there’s the supporting cast, a procession of faces that drift in, mumble a line, and evaporate. If Chekhov’s gun had this many redundancies, it’d be buried in the desert by chapter three.
The pacing drags like a three-legged mule thanks to Cogburn’s devotion to describing every hat, saddle, and grain of sand in vivid detail. The action, when it finally arrives, hits hard but never fast enough to make up for the long slogs in between.
As for the cliffhanger ending, it’s less a nail-biter and more a polite shove toward a sequel that I have no intention of reading. “Smoke Wagon” is fine if you like your westerns loud, familiar, and lightly soaked in testosterone. But for all its smoke and bravado, the gun never quite goes off.
⭐ ⭐