From author Alex Grecian, saddle up for Red Rabbit, a horror romp across the Wild West, where the plains are unforgiving—and the monsters are even worse.
Red Rabbit follows Sadie Grace who is wanted for witchcraft, dead (or alive). And every hired gun in Kansas is out to collect the bounty on her head, including bona fide witch hunter Old Tom and his mysterious, mute ward, Rabbit.
On the road to Burden County, they’re joined by two vagabond cowboys with a strong sense of adventure – but no sense of purpose – and a recently widowed schoolteacher with nothing left to lose. As their posse grows, so too does the danger.
Racing along the drought-stricken plains in a stolen red stagecoach, they encounter monsters more wicked than witches lurking along the dusty trail. But the crew is determined to get that bounty, or die trying.
We sat down with author Alex Grecian to find out more…
When did you first get the idea for Red Rabbit?
A few years ago, I rewatched The Magnificent Seven with my son, who hates Westerns. For a while there I was showing him Westerns I love, hoping he’d give the genre another chance. But seeing it through his eyes, I started picking that movie apart, wondering if it might be too straightforward, if it needed some ambiguity. In it, a posse rides out to a farming community to deal with a bandit, and (spoilers) they deal with the bandit. I imagined how the story would change if the farmers—and by extension those seven magnificent cowboys—were in the wrong. What if the farmers weren’t well-intentioned at all and had duped the posse?
Incidentally, my son really liked the movie, and I needn’t have been so critical of it, but the seed had been planted. I suddenly needed to write the, very different, story I’d conjured up.
What were your inspirations when writing the story?
The working subtitle was “There and Back Again,” after the subtitle of The Hobbit. That book shares an underlying structure with Lonesome Dove, one of my all-time favorite Westerns, and I shamelessly borrowed it for Red Rabbit. In fact, I haven’t read a whole lot of Westerns. I think Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy, and Elmore Leonard are the only Western authors I’ve ever read, so I’m sure I was subconsciously influenced by them as I wrote.
Why choose the Wild West to set the story?
My first five books were set in Victorian England, but as much as I love that time and place, I wanted to write about where I live, so I decided to set Red Rabbit in that era I was so familiar with, but on this side of the Atlantic, which made the American Old West a natural focus. The book was originally going to be a straightforward Western. Sadie Grace was going to be a woman falsely accused of being a witch. But she surprised me, and Red Rabbit became a fantasy novel as I was writing it.
The novel is rich with historical and period details. How did you balance historical accuracy with creative storytelling?
I always start a book by doing a lot of broad research on the place I’m setting the story, their societal structure, technology, etc. Then I let the characters do whatever they decide to do and end up stopping a lot to do more specific research. For instance, when my little posse steals a wagon in this book, I wanted it to be something big and distinctive, so I chose a Wells Fargo coach, then I spent a day learning everything I could about those particular coaches, including how they were built. All of that ended up being just a single paragraph in the book, but the characters deciding to take the wagon in the first place guided the story and the research, not the other way around.
You have a wonderful band of central characters in Red Rabbit – do you have a favourite character and why?
Firstly, thank you! I genuinely love all my characters (the sole major exception being Jack the Ripper in the Murder Squad books), but I guess I would have to choose either Sadie (she’s utterly confident and in control of her life) or Joe Mullins (he’s such a sweet guy, and just wants to make sure his wife is okay, even after he dies).
Speaking of all those characters, how do you go about balancing so many characters in one story to make sure one doesn’t have more page time than the others?
I do hope it’s balanced. I think it’s probably a product of some undiagnosed ADHD. I get bored if I stay with one character too long and need to go check in on someone else. But I do go back when the thing’s finished and move chapters and scenes around to make sure it’s all broken up evenly. Which can cause all sorts of trouble with the time of day and the weather, so then I go back over and smooth everything out. It’s a process.
Red Rabbit has demons, witches and ghosts – are there any other supernatural creatures you would have liked to include?
I threw every creature I thought I could make fit into that book, including a werewolf (I substituted cannibals for vampires), but I somehow missed zombies and angels. I’ve corrected that with the sequel: Rose of Jericho.
Red Rabbit ties up the story, but would you like to re-visit this world if possible? If so, what character would you follow?
Oh, I got ahead of you! I think the title Rose of Jericho gives away that I had more to say about Rose. It turns out I had more to say about three of the other characters, too. I won’t give away which of them, though. There’s a high body count in Red Rabbit, and I wouldn’t want to let slip who lives and who dies for anyone who hasn’t read it yet.
What are you reading right now?
I’m usually reading three or four books at a time, always with a big pile of new books I’m anxious to get to. But the book sitting next to me in my office right now is Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie, about the mirror aspects of horror. Under it, is Chuck Palahniuk’s new book about his writing career, and I’m greatly enjoying the snippets he includes from his book tours. They seem much stranger than any of mine have been.
What’s next for you?
Out next, of course, is Rose of Jericho. I have a novella called The Boatman coming out at some point, and I’m currently working on a book about a descendant of the Huntsman from Red Rabbit, though it’s not directly tied to that book. I get asked all the time whether there will be a sixth Murder Squad book, and I hope there will be (especially since I started writing it years ago), but I have my next couple books filling up my head, and I’m excited to get them out there!
Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian is out now! Order your copy here.
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