Review based on an ARC provided by the publisher via NetGalley

Decades after being driven away from her hometown as a child, Tara Abernathy has resurrected gods, fought monsters, and saved the day on multiple locations. But when she returns to Edgemont for a family funeral, Tara finds the town under assault by evil remnants of old Craft workings and must work with an old friend and a young magic user to save the people who once tried to kill her.

Dead Country saw me coming, and laid out a series of tropes and vibes I (mostly) love that worked well together. At the broadest strokes it’s a western – the gunmagicslinger comes to an isolated town, and must save it from the raiders. There’s a bit of From Dusk Till Dawn (with demon zombies instead of vampires), a bit of Hellboy, a bit of Mad Max, and even a bit of a Hallmark movie. At one point, I was even convinced that the successful city woman back home in the small town she resented would wind up finding love and settling down, if only because Tara kept insisting so hard that she was going to leave.

But the strongest connection (and for me, the most important) was to Discworld, specifically Night Watch. This influence plays out in several ways, including the overall vibe of “this is a story universe where powerful beings regularly threaten the world’s existence so the current events may seem small by consideration, but these people deserve protection, too.” There are also meditations on power (as Tara becomes a teacher and reflects on the ways her instructors used and abused their students) and the ethical obligations people have to each other just for being people (lines like “we’ve failed each other a lot, this town and me. Someone has to suck it up and do the work,” and “what do we become, when we see people as things to be owned or traded?” especially bring Vimes and Granny Weatherwax to mind). So while the setting may initially feel very different from the previous Craft books, this turns out to be a way of saying that the big problems of the world need to be confronted everywhere and not just the “important” places.

It’s worth noting that while this is the seventh book in the Craft universe, it’s intended to be new entry point and the beginning of The Craft Wars – a new subseries in the world of the Craft Sequence.

Dead Country releases tomorrow (March 7, 2023). You can find a local bookstore to order the print version at IndieBound, or an ebook at Kobo (or presumably most other ebook distributors).