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Title: The Doctor and The Kid
Series: Weird West Tales #2
Author: Mike Resnick
Rating: 2.5 of 5 Stars
Genre: Steampunk
Pages: 235
Words: 77K
Another lacklustre series by Resnick. This was Book #2 in the Weird West Tales series and you might wonder why I read and reviewed this instead of the first book, The Buntline Special. I would recommend you sit down. If you have a weak heart or are given to vapors, please, stop reading now. I didn’t read the first book BECAUSE, da da dum, it wouldn’t open on my kindle oasis.
Shock
Gasp
Wince
Vapors!
I know, I know. It shocked me to the core as well. I even reconverted the azw3 file with calibre and it still wouldn’t open. Since I had stopped caring about Resnick since his pathetic outing on the John Justin Mallory series, I pre-emptively didn’t care about book 1 of this series either. So on to book 2 it was.
Sadly, I made the right choice in pre-emptively not caring.
Doc Holliday is a bastard, pushing away everyone near to him. At one point he deliberately says some really nasty things about his best friend’s wife just because he’s feeling ornery. And Holliday even likes the poor lady. He’s just the worst that humanity has on tap.
Resnick does his patented “He said, He did” style of writing and what could have been a real interesting idea (Geronimo and other Indian shamans have kept the US bottled at the Mississippi River and the US Government has hired Thomas Edison and Ned Buntline to try to find a way to break their magic using technology coupled with Doc Holliday taking down Billy the Kid) turned into a drunken, consumptive asshole killing some people and telling everyone he meets he can’t wait to die.
Inspiring stuff! I was thrilled beyond belief.
It wasn’t terrible. It just wasn’t any good. But I have given Resnick enough passes and so I am done with him as an author.
Next!
★★✬☆☆
From the Publisher
Click to Open
Welcome to a West like you’ve never seen before! With the O. K. Corral and the battle with the thing that used to be Johnny Ringo behind him, the consumptive Doc Holliday makes his way to Deadwood, Colorado. But when a gambling loss drains his bankroll, Doc aims for quick cash as a bounty hunter. The biggest reward? Young, 20-year-old desperado known as Billy the Kid. With a steampunk twist on these classic characters, nothing can be as simple as it seems.
