The Unkillable Frank Lightning
With his signature lean, clean prose, Texan author Josh Rountree (The Legend of Charlie Fish) has penned a Frankenstein-inspired tale unlike any other. With equal parts Cormac McCarthy, Mary Shelley, and Stephen Graham Jones, Rountree coalesces myth and legend into a dramatic tale of love, death, and its terrible aftermath.
Catherine Coldbridge is a complicated woman: a doctor, an occultist, and, briefly, a widow.
In 1879, Catherine's husband, Private Frank Humble, was killed in a Sioux attack. Consumed by grief, she used her formidable skills to resurrect her husband. But after the reanimation, Frank lost his soul, becoming a vicious undead monster.
Twenty-five years later, Catherine has decided she must make things right. She travels to Texas with a pair of hired killers. But Frank is no longer a monster. He has remade himself as the Unkillable Frank Lightning, traveling with the Wild West Show.
With his signature lean, clean prose reminiscent of Raymond Chandler, Josh Rountree (The Legend of Charlie Fish) has penned a Frankenstein-inspired tale unlike any other. With equal parts Cormac McCarthy and Stephen Graham Jones, Rountree coalesces myth and legend into a dramatic tale of love, death, and its terrible aftermath.
'With The Unkillable Frank Lightning, Rountree solidifies himself as not only one of the best writers working today, but makes the case for being the best Western writer of our present century.' – C. S. Humble, author of That Light Sublime trilogy
Josh Rountree is a novelist and short story writer who writes across multiple genres, and focuses mostly on horror and dark fantasy. His novel, The Legend of Charlie Fish, released by Tachyon Publications to wide acclaim in 2023, selected for the Locus Recommended Reading List and named one of Los Angeles Public Library’s best books of the year. More than seventy of Rountree’s short stories have been published in a variety of venues, including The Deadlands, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Bourbon Penn, Realms of Fantasy, PseudoPod, Weird Horror, and The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror. Several collections of his short fiction have been published, most recently, Death Aesthetic. Rountree lives in the greater Austin, Texas, metropolitan area with his lovely wife of many years and a pair of half-feral dogs who command his obedience.