A cavalry field doctor educated in the occult hires two killers to accompany her on a quest to undo a decades-old mistake: resurrecting her husband. Josh Rountree's The Unkillable Frank Lightning is a heart-wrenching, Frankenstein-esque novel set against a bleak backdrop of the western United States.
In 1905, Catherine Coldbridge sets out on a train to Texas with the Dawson brothers. No matter how much whiskey or laudanum she drinks, she is haunted by the memory of summoning her husband's soul back to his body and unable to shake the feeling that she touched "a darker corner of reality." Her only hope for atonement is to track him down with Cowboy Dan's Wild West Revue, in which he is performing as the Unkillable Frank Lightning. That is, if her magic will even let her untie his soul from his body again.
Chapters alternate between 1905 and 1879, when Frank was killed in a Sioux attack just two weeks after their wedding. Rountree (The Legend of Charlie Fish) skillfully builds suspense as he shares Catherine's memories of the horrific event that separated her from Frank after she brought him back to life. Tension mounts as he fills in the details of what happened before and after the resurrection until he finally reveals it on the page. With spare prose and a sympathetic eye, Rountree conveys the wild grief that drove Catherine to the resurrection, her later recoiling from those powers, and Frank's complicated emotions about being returned from death. The Unkillable Frank Lightning is for fans of dark westerns and classic retellings. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library