Review: Hellbound Bastards

The trick of cosmic horror is always in the stakes: how do you maintain dramatic tension

when your central conflict is between an unfathomable, almighty evil and just some guy who

happens to be in its way? In Hellbound Bastards, author Chris W. McGuinness cleverly tackles

this problem by pinning his story to a protagonist and setting that feel more like a way to say

something about why humans are so good at killing each other than just another Cthulhu copy.

McGuinness’s wild, weird West is gritty and visceral, and the setting pairs naturally with his

splatter prose. If you caught the Lonesome Dove wave this summer but wished it had more

demonic monstrosity, this may be the book for you.

McGuinness’ guy facing the end of the world happens to be Leslie McCready,

formidably evil in his own right, but still a mortal being. McCready is clever and nasty enough to

slip the hangman’s noose in the novella’s opening pages but can’t outrun his past. Charlotte

Barrett, a Pinkerton in the service of industrialist Vernon Calgary, scoops up McCready and

swiftly delivers him to her boss. Calgary wants to use his piles of robber baron gold to banish an

unknowable evil known colloquially as The Wild Hunt, and McCready might be a useful ally

thanks to his own run-in with the strange force. As the whole town of Juala prepares for the final

showdown, Barrett and McCready explore Calgary’s true motives. The premise and pacing are

snappy, pulpy, and cinematic.

The novella clips along too swiftly for the tension to flag, but McGuinness finds time to

give McCready just enough depth thanks to his moments of tenderness with Bernice, a young

woman seeking security in sex work in Juala, and his haunting regret for the one kill he didn’t

finish. There’s nothing admirable about McCready, but there is a kind of pity in how even the worst of the worst can still be wounded by his own actions and the cruelty of the world around

him. The rest of the cast of characters feel similarly familiar and yet specific: all drawing from

classic Western tropes but with enough unique detail to feel fresh. Their moments of very human

suffering cut through the graphic prose to give the story some real weight — it’s never just gore

for the sake of it.

But the Western setting and violence aren’t just for vibes. McGuinness begins his story

two decades after the American Civil War and pointedly calls to mind the gristmill trauma of the

conflict. Even a heart as black as McCready’s is angered by the sight of a group of men too

young to remember wearing stolen Union soldier uniforms, and the supernatural scars of Juala’s

residents might as well be a metaphor for the wounds of war. The Hunt manifests as an undead

army of fallen warriors from all of human history and geography, from Neanderthals with their

crude spears to monstrous men from McCready’s own lifetime. And Calgary’s secret weapon? A

Gatling gun, albeit modified with magic, but terrifying in its own right as the moment’s latest

update in murderous technology. Maybe the only thing that could stand up to a supernatural

force calling on the whole history of human war is our great talent for inventing more efficient

ways of killing each other, and maybe what that evil really wants is to inspire such ingenious

cruelty. And McGuinness’s descriptions of the Hunt’s aftermath call to mind another rising

technology of the time: the advent of documentary photography as seen through the widely

distributed and graphic images of Civil War battlefields. McGuinness could set a weird Western

at any time, surely, so his choice of this historical moment is intentional.

If you can handle the violence, if you love a good Wild West adventure with a difficult

protagonist, Hellbound Bastards is a solid cosmic horror read that shows a devotion to all of its

elements. While there were moments where I wanted more, say, scenes of McCready’s youth back East, or more development of Barrett as a foil for McCready, McGuinness’s prose and

characters always held my attention. The novella’s not-too-tidy epilogue is a clever bookend to

its themes and yet left me imagining what might happen next – an evil so attuned to our own

cruelty, we would not have long to wait.

Check out Chris's website here!