The Fellowship of YEE-HAW!

Bishop O’Connell, Two-Gun Witch

The Elves and their fiercest allies, the Lakota Nation, fought fiercely against the American settlers, but history already records that they lost. Now Talen, one of the Elven nation’s greatest warriors, lives the life of a colonized person. She hunts outlaws for a government that systematically oppresses her people, a paradox she’s all too aware of, thank you very much. So taking another bounty on a White settler doesn’t ruffle her moral feathers. At first.

Bishop O’Connell’s fourth novel reflects two authors whose novels influenced my heady youth: Lloyd Alexander and Zane Grey. Both authors, in their way, wrote about almost-historical lands that sort of existed, but not really, nations of moral clarity and larger-than-life conflicts, where survivors tested their mettle and emerged stronger. O’Connell’s novel treads similar ground, though he updates the moral symmetry for our more fraught times. The product is familiar and strange at the same time.

Talen is a Shadow Warden, a guardian of magical purity for her people. But after the war, when the Elves and Lakota alike were forced onto reservations, Talen bought herself a measure of freedom by becoming a U.S. Marshal, bringing in “the stained,” people whose souls have become so suffused with black magic, they can’t be saved, only killed. In the bleak desert southwest, Talen is terribly effective. This doesn’t save her from racism, though.<

In O’Connell’s telling, the Elves lived in harmony with nature and Indigenous society before White settlers came, partly because fighters like Talen kept evil away. But White society and its technological terrors brought something worse than colonialism: they brought moral complexity. This longing for supposed long-lost virtue is common to both fantasy and Western literature, a belief that people once knew right from wrong. Talen, more than most, understands the difference between “right” and “lawful.”

Though mostly centered in New Mexico, big money tempts Talen to pursue a bounty in the Dakota Territory. A White woman there has supposedly gone stained, leaving a wake of destruction behind. But even before finding her prey, Talen realizes something doesn’t smell right. Her supposedly morally rotten prey is a soft-spoken farm widow who loves horses and doesn’t handle a firearm correctly. Talen suspects she’s been sent after a false bounty for nefarious purposes.

Bishop O’Connell

Unfortunately, Talen isn’t the only half-official lawman pursuing Margaret Jameson. The Red Right Hand, a fanatic religious sect, hates the stained almost as much as it hates Elves and Lakota. And unlike Talen, who remains bound by her people’s unjust treaty with the federal government, the Red Right Hand has official standing. Talen is an accomplished warrior, but that matters little as she finds herself outmanned, outgunned, and fighting a second war against White colonialism.

It possibly isn’t coincidental that Talen’s name resembles Lloyd Alexander’s protagonist, Taran. Both heroes believe naively that they understand the moral implications of the outside world, but leaving their comfort zone, they quickly realize the world is a thicket of compromise and ambiguity. They also both become dependent on friends they didn’t know they had, much less needed. The outside world is a scary, murderous place, after all. Nobody should have to face it alone.

Despite the backward-looking nostalgia common to both Westerns and fantasy, though, there’s a distinctly modern component to O’Connell’s narrative. He populates his frontier America with groups like Elves, Dwarves, Native Americans, and White religious nuts, who all perceive the world in strictly binary terms: everyone believes they’re standing fast against implacable evil. Only when these groups come into friction does anybody realize things are possibly more complex—or that they themselves might not be heroes.

Talen begins the novel thinking that evil is an individual transgression, a single soul tainted by darkness. But Margaret Jameson’s plight forces her to rethink everything she believes. Soon she must gather a fellowship of others like her, survivors who, for various reasons, no longer believe their governments and the official story. In chasing the true source of corruption, they must soon leave their safe wilderness and venture into that darkest of unknown lands: Chicago.

O’Connell’s novel is both a continuation of the fantasy and Western genres, and a subversion. Readers find his initial language and imagery familiar, as genre audiences seek. But then O’Connell subverts genre expectations, not once or twice, but time after time. Each new revelation reveals deeper ways our characters, and therefore we, have believed widespread lies. We finish the book realizing, with Talen and her fellowship, that only one truth is sacred: your own conscience.