There were two things that made me want to read Steve Vernon's novella Long Horn, Big Shaggy. One was having already read his short story collection Nightmare Dreams. The other was reading the promotional tagline.

"There's things out there that you ain't dreamt of! Like back-from-the-dead mountain men, green ghost rock spirits, carrion stallions, time-traveling mad scientists, and zombified buffalo for starters."

Is there any doubt this is a story to read?

We start simply, with Jonah Walker, bank robber and horse thief, in the middle of the desert and his horse is shot in the opening sentence. Jonah looks around, wondering where the shot came from and trying to recall how many bullets are left in his own gun. He spots a cave from which the shots originated, but it's too far and Jonah's own gun too pathetic to reach. And then the crawlers start after him.

"There was something moving out there. A lot of somethings, crawling out of the foot of the mountain. Bodies. Walking. Looked like half a dozen, maybe more.

"Hell.

"Jonah saw the plan, clear as the wart on the nose on his face. The cave booger's long rifle killed his horse and would keep him pinned down long enough for the foot soldiers to come get him.

"He spat in the dirt.

"'Nothing I hate worse than organization.' he griped."

Jonah takes out a couple of the crawlers coming after him, but they keep coming. Then, before he can figure out this puzzle, a rock lifts off the ground next to him and a man in a hole tells him, "Shinny on down here if you want to keep breathing this side of Tartarus." And then a bullet takes off part of Jonah's skull.

Leadbetter, the man in the mountain with the long rifle, is working for the Moon Man, an electric blue head that keeps Leadbetter and several other re-animated corpses active. There's something out there in the desert, under the mountains, that the Moon Man wants, and the crawlers, the back-from-the-dead mountain men, are eating their way through the ground to find it. Jonah and his horse were intended as food since what the dead really like to eat his meat. And what they REALLY like to eat is brains.

Meanwhile, Jonah has been re-animated by Zachaeus, the man in the ground, who's magic is more pure than the Moon Man's. He leads Jonah down into the mountain, away from the crawlers, and begins to instruct him in the ways of living dead-dom.

And through all this, there's a living dead decapitated head, crawling along in the dark with its jaw, tongue, and teeth in an effort to avenge itself.

Steve Vernon's Long Horn, Big Shaggy is a hell of a fun read, and at just over 100 pages, you're done in a few hours. And really reading it in one sitting is best because there are scene changes every few pages and we shift back and forth to keep up on all the separate subplots, backstories, and developments. The language is flowery at times, way too many similes ("He hit the ground like a sack full of busted bricks" and "The townsfolk rose up like cat bit mad dogs, rooting in the street for the brain stained chunks of dirty gold and folding cash") and colloquialisms ("He was hurting worse than heart broke pain..." and "The booger was hiding somewhere close to the mountain's kneecaps, and all Jonah was hitting was the mountain's big toe") but after a while even these seem to disappear.

If there’s a problem here, I think it’s in the beginning. You’re told to start a short story in the middle of the action, but this isn’t a short story and for such a long work, I think the readers needs a second to acclimate themselves to the world, the language, and the characters before we’re thrust into the middle of a shootout. That sudden shove directly into the heat of it is jarring and we’re looking around wondering how we got HERE. But once that shootout is over, the pacing is right on, the longer chapters up front while we get to know the characters, discover the histories and make our revelations, and then, in the end we're treated to some of the shortest chapters I've ever read outside of a Captain Underpants book as Vernon keeps us abreast of the happenings in what seems like half a dozen places all at once, like a montage in an action movie where everything's happening so fast you don't see it all until it's over and you can finally breathe easy, looking around to see who's still standing.

It still kills me how this Nova Scotian boy who lives a few months of every year expecting his power to be cut off for days at a time due to the icy weather can still write so convincingly of the American southwest. In the desert scenes I felt the heat bearing down on me. In the underground scenes, I smelled the dirt and felt the earth pressing down over me. If I didn't know better and had been asked guess, I would have said this was written by someone who'd lived most of his life IN the American southwest, and that's part of Vernon's skill; it doesn't matter where his story is set, he writes it like he's lived there for years.

Vernon’s got the whole package here, a hell of an imagination, he creates some great characters and situations (the decapitated head has a very good scene with the Great Green Ghost--and that’s a sentence I never thought I’d write), his writing is solid, and he knows how to market the hell out of his work. Let's remember the hilarious promotion Vernon did for Long Horn, Big Shaggy--the winner got a genuine zombified buffalo of their very own. I saw the pictures.

I don’t know WHAT kind of delirium might have created this story in someone’s head but I do know the outcome, Long Horn, Big Shaggy, was, for me, a very satisfying read from one of my favorite authors of the past few years. Steve Vernon is a natural storyteller.

Recommended: Yes