With “Red Rabbit,” author Alex Grecian wrangles the dusty, weather-beaten classic American Western and subverts its familiar tropes with eerie, sometimes visceral, folk horror.
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In This LitStack Review of Red Rabbit
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Red Rabbit
by Alex Grecian
Instead of shootouts and prairie myths, Red Rabbit by Alex Grecian delivers a ride through a haunted Kansas made horror myth with bone-carved witchcraft, 19th century massacre, campfire humor, ghosts, and a sense of impending dread. If you want storytelling that is atmospheric, imaginative, and grounded by a cast of misfit characters, Red Rabbit is a standout pick.
A Town, A Witch, and a Bounty
Set against the sun-parched expanse of late nineteenth-century Kansas, Red Rabbit unfolds as a grim folk-horror story disguised as an American Western. The ordeal begins in the dying settlement of Riddle, where drought, disease, and misfortune have driven the townsfolk to radical madness. Looking for an author of their ruin, they fix culpability onto Sadie Grace, a recluse living at the edge of town. The townsfolk brand her a witch, pool their meager savings, and place a thousand-dollar bounty on Sadie’s head, drawing every opportunist and hunter in the territory.
The Accidental Posse of the Red Coach
Chief among those vying for the bounty is Old Tom, a stubborn, weathered witch hunter who believes he has already finished the job. Having set a slow, distance-killing hex on Sadie Grace with pins, straw, and graveyard soil, Tom commandeers a bright scarlet stagecoach to go collect the witch’s body.
Along the way, Old Tom’s solitary enterprise collapses into an accidental family of misfits. He takes in Rabbit, a waif who speaks in rare whispers and carries secrets older than the plains. Soon they absorb Ned Sump and Moses, a pair of drifter cowpokes looking for easy gold, and the widow Rose Mullins, an iron-willed former mail-order bride who has just laid her murdered husband in the grave. Unbeknownst to the travelers, his ghost, Rose’s late husband, Joe Mullins, trails alongside the group, keeping vigil over his widow who cannot see him.
A Gauntlet Across the Hungry Frontier
The trek toward Riddle devolves into a gauntlet across an infected frontier. These plains are not empty territory, they’re a living, hungry liminal space populated by shapeshifters, cannibals, curses of the massacred and restless dead, and a relentless demonic pursuer known only as the Huntsman. As horrifying encounters thin their resolve, the bounty becomes secondary to raw survival. When the members of the posse confront the reality of the witch Sadie Grace, they discover that the woman is neither pure demon nor helpless victim. The story forces every survivor to reckon with the monstrosity inside humanity and the ancient horrors waking beneath the soil.
Folk Sorcery, Bones, and Primordial Dirt
The novel’s treatment of the supernatural is rooted deeply in visceral, tangible folk craft rather than standard fantasy genre spellcasting. Witchcraft in this world is as practical as oats or baked beans, physical, sometimes messy, and tied intimately to spit, blood, storytelling, and the dirt and dust of the plains. Old Tom practices a brand of sympathetic magic, manipulating crude poppets, animal bones, spit, and hair according to ritual rules. This witchcraft stands in stark contrast to the innate, primordial power carried by Sadie Grace and Rabbit, who don’t cast spells so much as embody forces of creation, decay, and transformation.
The setting and environs of Lonesome Dove here are more animistic; ghosts share the campfire with the living, crows carry unspoken dread, and curses left by the dead bleed into folk stories like sickness or contagion.
The Roving Eye of the Campfire Fable
The story is narrated through multiple third-person perspectives that bring to mind tales told around a restless fire. Moving with ease across short, clipped chapters, the narration shifts between Tom, Rose, the gunslingers, and most notably with exceptional deftness and, yes, grace, with Sadie Grace–the isolated witch. Grecian even gives voice to passing strangers and ghosts, as if they were contributors to the weekly issue of the wagon-train Gazette.
Imbued with a plain-spoken quasi-detachment, the narrative treats gruesome violence and impossible horrors with flat, matter-of-fact practicality, so that a demonic apparition seems as plausible, inevitable and dangerous as a pack of hungry coyotes, or gangrene or winter frost. Along with anchoring the point of view to these home-spun characters using sparing language and structure, Grecian creates a strong undercurrent of impending and malleable dread, as a story can change and grow more sinister with each telling. The prairie of Red Rabbit is vast and indifferent, yet surprising and predatory in ways not encountered in other Westerns.
Unforgettable Atmosphere on an Unforgiving Frontier
For readers drawn to dark, atmospheric (and sometimes humorous) storytelling, Red Rabbit manages all the elements between gritty frontier fiction and folk horror. Grecian captures the bleak, unsparing texture of a western novel and infuses it with the macabre supernatural of a horror novel.
The book shines brightest in its narration by Sadie Grace and in its ensemble of flawed, weary travelers, their dark humor, midwest sensibilities, and a growing camaraderie that lends emotional warmth against a nightmarish backdrop. Paired with visceral, dirt-and-bone magic and a propulsive, campfire-tale pacing, Red Rabbit is an inventive Western odyssey where the monsters that lurk in this American wilderness feel as real and inevitable as the dangers of the untamed and perilous 19th century prairie.
The good news for readers who fall under the spell of Red Rabbit is that the journey across the haunted frontier is far from over. While Red Rabbit is definitely a standalone read, Alex Grecian returns to the plains with the same characters in the novel, Rose of Jericho, expanding the folklore, danger, and dark mysteries you’ll enjoy in Red Rabbit.
Alex Grecian is a bestselling American novelist, short fiction writer, and comic book author. He began his creative career in advertising before transitioning full-time to storytelling. Grecian first earned critical acclaim in the comics industry, co-creating the popular Image Comics series Proof and Rasputin.
He made his prose debut with The Yard, launching the historical mystery series Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad, which includes acclaimed titles like The Black Country and The Devil’s Workshop. Known for his atmospheric blend of historical realism and dark genre tropes, Grecian later ventured into contemporary thrillers with The Saint of Wolves and Butchers, as well as folk horror and the supernatural Western with Red Rabbit and its sequel, Rose of Jericho.
A multiple-time Kansas Notable Book Award honoree and Inkpot Award recipient, Grecian lives in the American Midwest with his family.
Here are a few LitStack Spots of titles by Alex Grecian that you should buy for your TBR stack, including Rose of Jericho by Alex Grecian, The Devil’s Workshop by Alex Grecian, and The Black Country by Alex Grecian.
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As an affiliate of Bookshop.org, Malaprop’s, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Audiobooks.com, Chirp, 2nd & Charles, Amazon, NameHero, Envato, and Place-It, LitStack may earn a commission—at no cost to you—when you purchase through our affiliate links. We appreciate the brands we work with, and also appreciate that using our affiliate links may help you find your next great read, a book or two or more, in whatever form, while simultaneously supporting LitStack. When you use our affiliate links, you help keep LitStack running—and for that, we thank you.
