Walking Wolf: A Weird Western

Collins' latest is both a variation on the western werewolf premise of her last novel, Wild Blood, and an extension of themes she has been developing since her 1989 debut in Sunglasses After Dark, which won a Bram Stoker Award for its imaginings about supernatural beings who masquerade in human guise. Narrator Billy Skillet is the 150-year-old shapeshifter offspring of a human mother and vargr (werewolf) father. The first half of Billy's tale is a picaresque romp in which the competing demands of his human and feral sides drive him from the west-Texas Comanches among whom he's raised in the mid-19th century into the white man's world, where he works as a saloon attendant, a drummer for a traveling medicine show and a sidekick for a vampire gunslinger. Midway through the narrative, Billy's irreverent portrait of the Wild West and his wry reflections on human nature give way to sober sermonizing on the white man's destruction of the Indian nation and to didactic appearances by legendary Indians like Sitting Bull and Red Cloud. Billy, with a nod to Mark Twain, admonishes at the outset of his tale that ``anyone attempting to find a moral will be gut-shot''; would that he had heeded his own warning. (May)