I was immediately fascinated by the railwraiths, which attack the crews in the desert – violent spirits who rip up the tracks as they’re laid down and use them to form monstrous bodies. But it’s the differences that make his Old West setting stand out. The Shohari, a strange people trying to protect the land they’ve always called home, are cut from much the same cloth as historical Native Americans.

Certainly there were greedy rail barons who wanted to push their railroads through the wilderness at any cost. Galley’s world definitely has its parallels with our own at the time. It’s a rough and dangerous place on the fringe of civilization, and Merion, with the help of his aunt, his faerie friend Rhin, and a strange prospector nicknamed Lurker, will have to learn a lot about himself in a hurry to survive. The aunt, Lilain, serves as the undertaker in the small railroad town of Fell Falls, Wyoming. Instead, the will stipulates that he travel to America to live with an aunt that he doesn’t know until his 18th birthday, when he’ll receive his inheritance. The 13-year-old Merion expects to inherit his father’s estate and lead the search for his killer.

Merion, as his friends and family call him, is much what you’d expect from a pampered lordling, until tragedy strikes and his father is murdered. The book tells the story of Tonmerion Hark, a young English lord in an 1860s world that’s not all that different from our own – at least at first blush. So, the setting and cowboy cover of “Bloodrush” alone were enough to get me interested, but Galley delivers so much more. I’m a sucker for a good old-fashioned, hard-nosed gunslinger protagonist – Stephen King’s Roland Deschain, David Gemmell’s Jon Shannow. I truly think that the Old West milieu is underused in fantasy. The latest being Ben Galley’s “Bloodrush,” which finished second with an overall 7.75 out of 10.

But as I make my way through the finalists of the competition, I’m finding some truly deserving books. I used to have a strong rule against accepting them, along with a snarky comment in my submission guidelines (Trust me, it was for good reason). If it’s accomplished nothing else, Mark Lawrence’s Self Published Fantasy Blog Off has certainly gone a long way toward changing the way that I view self-published books.

Bloodrush by Ben Galley