Review: His Ragged Company by Rance D. Denton

Blurb:

A pissed-off warlock with a taste for revenge.

An army of sand-golems with fistfuls of magic.

A wishing well with a mind of its own.

No wonder Blackpeak, Texas never got its spot on the map.

Town marshal Elias Faust thinks that he can make any problem go away if he throws enough lead at it. The living’s easy for a lawman. Bloody, but easy – that is, until Magnate Gregdon arrives with his undead syndicate to tear the town of Blackpeak, Texas apart.

When a shootout with a pair of outlaws goes sideways, Elias Faust accidentally draws the Magnate’s attention. As if dealing with arcane sorcery, reanimated corpses, and the Magnate’s personal vendetta aren’t enough, Faust finds himself at the center of a power-struggle for Blackpeak’s eldritch secrets.

Suddenly, staying alive just got a lot more complicated.

Hunted by a cadre of sandshades and hounded by sinister spellcraft, Elias Faust may be the only bag of skin defiant enough to keep Blackpeak from being destroyed. To outlast the Magnate’s disciples, he’ll need to shoot straighter, run faster, and live longer…even if it means sacrificing a part of himself to do just that.

Review:

Until April of 2024, I’ve not heard of “His Ragged Company” or of Rance D. Denton, and then I saw his tweet about having review copies to sling towards reviewers. So, being a person who is always looking for his next read, I went ahead and tossed him a DM. Fast forward a few weeks, I’m sitting in my room holding a copy of the book. Looked at it for a few seconds, set it down, went about with my afternoon, and then spent my evening reading the first chapters of the book. Went to bed, woke up the next morning, and devoured the rest of “His Ragged Company”. This was, without a doubt, an amazing read and I cannot wait to read book two.

If I had to sell this book to friends and family, I’d tell them about Elias Faust, and Blackpeak, and the fact that a town in the middle of nowhere has so much behind the scenes action that I stared at it for a while wondering how much detail was still to be found for Blackpeak. Also, this book takes place in Texas, a state I am familiar with and have suffered in for a bit, and therefore I can say that Denton has nailed the climate and that I had flashbacks of my time meandering about over there due to that.  But that is only a small snippet, a taste, of the overall book and that there’s so much more to it.

First of all, we have the characters. Elias Faust and Magnate Gregdon, alongside the various other side characters who are not in the blurb.
Elias Faus iis a marshal who accepted a post for policing the town of Blackpeak, and as of the book starting, he’s had a pretty boring job. Lock up the drunks, threaten those committing misdemeanours with jail time and help oversee the fight club run by Miss Garland. But that all changes once a miner known for petty theft and tall tales comes to him saying that two people, twins to be exact, stole something of his, leading to things going wildly off the rails and his perception of the town changed. Magnate Gregdon wants one thing, more magic. And the place to get more magic? Blackpeak, Texas. So when Faust gets involved, he goes on a warpath to remove him. 

As for the many side characters, most of whom are residents of Blackpeak, they felt real, tangible, and I was genuinely dismayed when lead started flying and they were put in danger.

Then, we have the location and plot. This book is set in the middle of the Texan desert, and it works. It feels like I am set in the Texan desert, and despite me not enjoying the absolute frying pan that is dry Texas, I liked the realism there. Plotwise, “His Ragged Company” is a western through and through, with all the action you can think of. It has Elias Faust get dragged into the conflict that surrounds Blackpeak through circumstance, and after that it’s practically a fight for survival, with the book barely slowing down for a break after that.  It works and I am all here for the second book going along the same lines.

After that, there’s the magic system of “His Ragged Company”. Sure, there’s lots of blasting and lots of shoot outs, but there’s also magic in this book. The blurb mentions sandshades, eldritch secrets and a warlock. The sandshades are explainable enough, those being reanimated corpses filled with sand. The eldritch secrets are just that, eldritch secrets. And the warlock has a totem that allows him to bend reality, not shape it, bend it to what he wants to accomplish.
On a completely different note, still within the magic part, there’s a well of immense power that draws people to it. Which led to Blackpeak. And eldritch secrets. Which in turn brings us back to this book.

Lastly, the switches of PoV for a singular character. Much like “Yellow Sky Revolt” by Baptiste Pinso Wu (my thoughts of the book here), the main character, Elias Faust, is recounting his history to someone else, and it switches between what he experienced in his memories and to the room where he’s recounting the story. At first it was jarring, but by the end, I was enjoying the back and forth between Elias and the guy sitting across from him sprinkled in between the nonstop action. 

If I had to critique anything about “His Ragged Company”, I’d have to go into the scripted feeling of some parts. It’s a light fantasy western, with many things not feeling scripted. But some scenes, some scenes read like a movie script. Other things felt like they were added just for the story convenience, and not for actual history or lore, like the farmhouse shenanigans pulled by the twins.

Besides that, if you want a refreshing western to read, and want to have a lot of fun watching action and intrigue unfold, I’d hand you this book, a Texas longhorn hat, and an orange fold out chair, wishing you a lot of fun reading Rance R. Dentons debut novel.

As always, thank you for reading this review, and I hope I’ve helped nudge you towards your next read. If not, don’t fret, we have plenty more reviews on this site for you to peruse, from daring space opera adventures, to almost mundane fantasy, Or you could hop onto one of the many buddy reads going on for some great books over in the SFF Insiders community on Discord. 

Wherever you are reading this review, have a good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and good night!