Editorial Reviews are in for Misery Plaza!

In Alo’s SF Western, nothing is as it seems in a frontier town in New Mexico, which is hiding outlaws and strange creatures, among other secrets.

As the story begins, Joseph Griffin—a man who goes by various aliases over the course of the story, including Edward Sullivan and Bill Potter—is on the run from the law in the Old West. After having his cover blown by an old acquaintance, he and his children, Isaac and Clara, set out for an abandoned family property in the small town of Missouri Plaza, New Mexico. As the family becomes more and more entangled in the town’s affairs, the fugitive worries for his and children’s safety, should he be recognized. Little does he know that three marshals are already in the process of tracking him down. However, it turns out that capture isn’t the only thing he needs to worry about, as there’s also something very strange dwelling underneath his new house—something that’s otherworldly. Alo’s novel is packed with vibrant characters; Griffin is especially compelling as the reader follows him on his quest to keep his family safe, all while dealing with the death of his wife, his substance-abuse issues, and trauma from serving in the Civil War. The plot does take some time to get going in earnest, but the novel’s second half is packed with incident. A standout scene presents a tense standoff between a group of cattle ranchers and a deadly creature, and the ensuing fight is cinematic in its use of tension and horror imagery: “With unrivaled speed, the creature crossed its face with both arms. Bullets struck its serrated forearm protrusions, ricocheting each round. One bullet zipped by Potter’s head.” Other than the aforementioned pacing issues, Alo’s novel is a charmingly spooky Western adventure, ideal for fans of the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King.

A genre-hopping and action-packed read.

A bloody but intimate epic of the weird west, Alo’s genre-bending thriller presents a classic premise—a one-time outlaw tries to lay low and protect his family in a frontier of bandits, marshals, and ever-looming trouble—and juices it with elements of horror and science fiction. The prologue covers the crash, in the American Southwest, of a flying craft piloted by something called the Antiquarian, so it’s no spoiler to report that the novel’s family-man protagonist, calling himself Potter, is in more danger than he knows when he endeavors to dig a well on the hardscrabble New Mexico property he and his two children have moved to after Potter gets spooked by a brush with his criminal past. Potter finds something, of course—a mysterious craft for which his only frame of reference is the ironclad gunships like the USS Merrimack. What they unearth will rock the small town of Missouri Plaza, a place where, Potter is told, “No one intentionally arrives … and stays.”

Alo has packed Misery Plaza with gory incident. As a bounty hunter closes in, and local fanatics see Potter’s son as a sacrificial vessel for their own bizarre ends, an unleashed Antiquarian is just the biggest in a series of visceral travails for Potter and family. But this hefty novel also digs deeply into its milieu and its characters’ hearts and minds, exploring the trauma that wracked the nation after the Civil War, perennial conflicts between the wealthy and the workers, issues of addiction, and more as a world-weary Potter tries to find it in himself to protect and provide for his children. Regret and a sense of spoiled promise haunt both the protagonist and Alo’s depiction of the West itself.

That sweep of storytelling comes at the expense of narrative momentum in the novel’s ambling first half, as Alo introduces the various souls who inhabit Missouri Plaza, illuminates backstories through flashbacks and nightmares, and offers chapters from the perspectives of the various human threats targeting the hero’s family. The back half, though, is brisk and brutal, alive with clever action, slasher horror, desperate showdowns, and the mysteries that (quite literally) lurk beneath town. Not for nothing is one character named Roswell.

Takeaway: Splattery epic mashup of western, SF, and horror.