If you want a refreshing, pulse-pounding, fast read that still has plenty of meat on its bones, in a future Weird West plot packed with fash-fighting, you can’t do better than Lilith Saintcrow’s novella Coyote Run, coming out Feb. 25. Coyote herself is a fiercely fun and powerful protagonist, but I also really enjoyed what I got to see of Marge and the other characters. And although I admire the economy of action in the vivid prose, it still sprinkles just enough hints of the alternate near-future to make this reader slow down a little and savor the worldbuilding, too.
The U.S. has apparently split up into territories such as Cascadia and Transcanada; in the West, war is being waged between the bureaucratic Federals and the fascist Lindberghs. A gene-plague spread by the Lindberghs, meant to “cleanse” the land to make more room for their white supremacist selves, has killed some people but turned quite a few into shapeshifters of various animal types. One of the latter is Coyote, a runner who takes tough, dangerous jobs near the front lines, and sometimes across them. Her latest job is to break Marge’s sister out of a Lindy concentration camp, and the easiest way to infiltrate it is to let herself get captured. And that’s all I’ll spoil of the plot.
Most of the people who know Coyote at all think she’s crazy, to put it politely. She may be sane, but she’s also pretty arrogant, relying on little but her own resilience and skills to survive and succeed, plus a cranky pack-robot. She doesn’t trust or respect most other people, and she doesn’t believe in causes, but she’s just soft-hearted enough to take extreme risks for a pittance of pay — moreover, she’s carrying a well-earned grudge and sees an opportunity for payback. (Also, it doesn’t hurt that her scrawny self appreciates Marge’s full figure.) I really reveled following her throughout this adventure (third-person past tense perspective), and found the story and its conclusion tremendously satisfying.
Coyote Run is a standalone work. However, Saintcrow’s website calls it “the first Amazing Tale of Antifascist Action,” so I am hopeful that more stories will follow in this setting, especially if this novella does well, which it certainly deserves!
Along the way, I also enjoyed a few Tuckerization tidbits. Hearne Lager is an obvious salute, since the publisher is Horned Lark Press, an imprint founded by author Kevin Hearne. And I cracked up at several references to a product named after a certain ubiquitous fanwriter that we all know and love, here at Skiffy and Fanty.
On a more serious note, each reader will need to decide when/whether they’re in the right mood for a novella that talks about fascists and their ramifications, from civil/territorial warfare to eugenics to concentration camps to torture in the name of pseudoscience. But it’s clear that they’re the bad guys, and sometimes it’s really the right time to enjoy a story about fighting back, and occasionally literally chewing them up and spitting them back out. I certainly had a great time reading this.
I was really surprised to realize when I looked at Saintcrow’s back catalogue that I haven’t read any other works by her before. That’s a serious omission that I’ll have to remedy once I catch up with some more of my review commitments. I expect that I’ll love a lot more of her books, when I get to them.
Content warnings: Fascism, eugenics, war, fighting, deaths, torture, body horror.
Comps: Hunger Makes the Wolf by Alex Wells; The Wolf’s Hour by Robert R. McCammon
Disclaimer: I received a free eARC of this novella from the publisher for review.
