Horror novelist Nick Cutter (The Troop) continues his streak of genre mash-ups with Little Heaven, a nasty epic that grafts Lovecraftian imagery onto a neo-western foundation, throwing in a cult subplot for good measure. The novel bounces back and forth in time between the 1960s (when three guns-for-hire named Micah, Minerva and Ebenezer get roped into a scheme to rescue a young boy from Little Heaven, a Jonestown-like cult in the backwoods of New Mexico) and the 1980s (when Micah rounds them back up to help save his daughter). The 1960s plot has the three gunfighters gradually discovering the horrific supernatural underpinnings of Little Heaven, while the 1980s story is about the trio's reluctant return to a place they've never been able to forget.
Cutter might not be as pithy as Elmore Leonard, but his hardboiled prose is perfect for the flowery unknowability that characterizes Lovecraftian horror: "When humans experience something that challenges their fundamental belief of the world--its reasonableness, its fixed parameters--well, their minds crimp just a bit. A mind folds, and in that fresh pleat lives a darkness that cannot be explained or accounted for." Which is not to say that Cutter is shy with gross-out scares: "It opened its mouth. Its face split in half, pulling its head apart; the top of its skull levered back like a Pez dispenser." The novel even includes grotesque illustrations perversely reminiscent of the charming sketches commonly found in 19th-century classics. Cutter knows horror, and he nails the basics well enough to support ambitious plotting and refreshing genre experimentation. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books