Hotblood!

Orlesky’s darkly romantic debut, first serialized online, conjures a gritty Weird West where centaurs gallop across the American frontier and sphinxes take out bounties. Evander Rook, a cynical, scarred centaur and soldier of fortune, crosses paths with fast-talking human opportunist Asa Langley, who works for an East Coast steel baron and hopes to strike it rich in the Wyoming Territory. “Asa was crazy enough to eat the devil with horns on,” Evander complains, but as they travel together, the two become partners, lovers, coconspirators, and deadly enemies. An epigraph from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian foreshadows the book’s bitterly elegiac tone, though it’s hard to miss the influence of Annie Proulx and Brokeback Mountain as well. The fantasy elements coexist within a realist American West of sunsets and smoke-filled skies, a troubled land being parceled out in “deals made so low under the table it was closer to romance than business.” Orlesky drapes desert vistas, frontier towns, and foreboding industrial zones in warm sepia tones and organic textures that the characters, human and inhuman alike, seem to inhabit naturally. Pulled off with attention-demanding originality, this cross-genre epic will rope in fans of historical fiction and romantasy that doesn’t guarantee a happily ever after. (Sept.)