#BookReview: Let Sleeping Gods Lie, by David J. West
H.P. Lovecraft meets Louis L'Amour
When Porter Rockwell's friend dig up an ancient book in Wild West California and offer to sell it for cheap, he thinks he's made a great deal.
But Porter has no clue of the horrors that this old book brings with it.
Porter, his partner Bloody Creek Mary, and his dog, Dawg, set out to track down a gang of murderous outlaws, but what they find is much stranger, including supernatural creatures, ancient ruins, and a gateway to another world.
The story
Porter Rockwell's friends have been murdered over a strange artifact: an ancient book. Porter sets out to discover why. As he digs deeper into the mystery, the stakes get higher, and he goes from tracking outlaws to shootouts to facing down monsters to entering the lair of ancient elder gods waiting to be released and bring ruin upon the Earth.
The supernatural elements of the story start at a slow burn. The initial hook brings the mystery, but the beginning of the story plays out like your standard western: white hats tracking black hats through the mountains and deserts to bring them to justice. That standard western takes a sharp left turn into the Lovecraftian in the third act, and it only gets weirder from there.
The characters
Porter Rockwell is, funnily enough, himself an outlaw, wanted for a murder he did not commit, as well as some that he did. But Porter is an outlaw with a hardcoded sense of justice, and his loyalty to his few friends is unquestionable. It is this loyalty and his own curiosity that drives Porter throughout the story.
His partner, Bloody Creek Mary, is a no-nonsense indigenous woman who accompanies him on his adventures. Though she acts as a check on Porter's more impulsive instincts, it is clear that there is a great deal of mutual respect between the two, and they are repeatedly bailing each other out of tough situations.
The world
The story takes place in California in the Old West, and largely conforms with the tropes and history associated with it, plus some added mythological lore. Saloons, Prospectors, and Chinese immigrants are thrown in indigenous mysticism and western cryptids such as Sasquatch. The end of the story draws the reader into the realm of the Elder Gods, complete with the strange geometries and cyclopean structures drawn straight from the works of H. P. Lovecraft.
The politics
There is not much old west politics to speak of in Let Sleeping Gods Lie, much less modern politics. This is a romp through the realms of eldritch horror, with no partisan ideology to be found.
Content warning
While there is plenty of violence and descriptions of Lovecraftian horrors, none of it is especially graphic.
Who is it for?
Anyone who loves Westerns and Lovecraft should read Let Sleeping Gods Lie.
Why read it?
Read it for good old fashioned western heroes going up against the most powerful beings in the cosmos.