I started mostly reading fantasy since January 2025, due largely to IRL reasons. A lot of these also are parts of series, which lowers the mental load of what to check out next and the amount of time I have to spend getting invested in new characters. Among this kick, I've stumbled upon three western novels in 2026: Red Country by Joe Abercrombie, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty, and Cibola Burns by James SA Corey.
Red Country is the sixth novel in Abercrombie's The First Law universe. It's more or less a standalone, introducing new characters and folding in some old ones. The Circle of the World in TFL is a fictional world, but Red Country takes us to the western edge of its borders and we pit an industrializing force of settlers on the frontier against indigenous horse-people. It's about revenge, lawlessness, rescue, redemption, and the darkness that lies in the human soul. Like No Country for Old Men, one of the characters is vicious enough to feel like a manifestation of evil, and that character's actions call for a reevaluation of the preceding books in Abercrombie's series.
The primary viewpoint characters are new, and while Shy isn't particularly notable, Temple - the lawyer who can't commit to a career - is wonderfully funny, one of the characters with the most genuine heart of the series. Humor is always a staple of The First Law, though in this book it tends to center mostly around Temple. Red Country might be my least favorite entry in this series, and maybe because its setting and cast felt detached from what I normally care about, but it's still a great read. "What's that you're always telling me again?" says Shy in Chapter 1, and from there, the hype begins.
Lonesome Dove is a big-time Reddit favorite, including on r/TheFirstLaw - it apparently greatly inspired Abercrombie. I had previously tried reading it a few years back and quickly gave up. This time, with someone in my life recommending it after recently having read it, I committed to it over the time I had an e-copy from my library.
The first thing to note about Lonesome Dove is that it, too, is very funny. The bulk of the plot follows an extremely ambitious cattle drive, but while there are some thrilling sequences among the journey, the charm of the book lies less in the action and more in the simple way the characters think and interact and get skewered by the narrative. Badass retired Texas Ranger, Captain Augustus McCrae, is bested and bothered by the fact that a cook they pick up off the street does better at cooking than he does. Gus is the hero of the story, and yet he's petty toward the cook. The town prostitute Lorena refers to "carrots" and "poking" as euphemisms for the tools of her trade. The ace tracker Deets is full of bizarre superstitions. Two little pigs follow the narrative with their cleverness, and it's important to note that they are not for rent. My favorite character/subplot is the hapless deputy Roscoe, who is beset upon by his sheriff's domineering sister-in-law and seduced (used?) by an extremely unlikely farmer woman who needs a pair of hands for labor and a man as a companion. The book does not limit itself to the firm POV structure of more modern books; like Austen or Dostoyevsky, we often get to hear directly the thoughts of how one character interprets another.
It may be something of a cliche to say that the best known example of a genre already contain the deconstruction of it. I don't know enough about the Western genre to say what conventions this 1980s novel deconstructs. But the narrative is very deliberately set in a time when the most romantic era (by some accounts) has already passed. You could easily call this book No Country for Old Men - Gus and his fellow Ranger, Woodrow Call, are decades past their prime, even if it doesn't stop their antics or ability to kick ass. They see themselves as the last of a great generation - and the narrative agrees. Young military officers or evil young Indians can't stand against them. Their greatest Mexican foe died off screen before the story even begins. The buffalo make periodic appearances, sometimes pursued by their hunters, but everyone knows they're on their way to extinction. Gus bemoans that when the USA "tamed" the Indians and Mexicans and outlaws, they got rid of all the interesting people. He's able to shoot up a bar he used to frequent to gain some respect, but shortly after he says that he and Call will be the next to join those outlaws. The whole reason for the cattle drive appears to be Call's attempt to feel alive again. The two are also dogged by the women of their past - Clara, who refused to be bound by Gus's philandering, and Maggie, whose love Call could not bear to accept.
The book never fully loses its humor, but it becomes much grimmer along the way. Characters suffer harm and death, and gradually the narrative becomes bleaker and bleaker as we start to realize what the book wants to say about humanity and the frontier. The romantic era of the West is definitively over - as we learn on something of an oasis of a farm, the future is in ranching, trading horses to the military, living in mud houses. Romantic love remains unrequited. Death comes for us, and the best of us go in the most ignominious of ways. The most seemingly moral of us can have no backbone when it comes to those we love most. The innocent cannot forgive a failure with good intentions. And anything you cling onto for sentiment - a sign, a wife, a child - breaks apart, dies, slips away. It's a consuming book that's almost perfectly designed to give you a book hangover. And yet it's simple and it's beautiful and you love it, because you have to love something for it to be able to hurt you like Lonesome Dove does.
Which leads me to Cibola Burns, Book 4 of The Expanse. This is another series that is often recommended to fans of epic fantasy with great characters and long-lived story arcs. Honestly, I don't think it's really on that truly epic level in terms of writing, but each book being self-contained and the series being complete does a lot of work for it - I'm listening to it on audiobook in conjunction with the books I read, and it's easy to keep pace.
Book 4 shifts the genre of the series to Space Western, which the never-overly-subtle narration points out a few times. Jim Holden, our returning character, represents a sheriff who's appointed by the outside to moderate the frontier, full of settlers and corporate goons. This is my favorite book of The Expanse so far, shrinking the scope to a single planet and bringing back some familiar faces to become our new POVs. We deal with natural disasters and alien technologies and malicious local biology, but - like most books in the series - the real enemy is how humans can be the biggest assholes to one another. This time we've got a "just following orders" POV, following the orders of a classic, dead-eyed sociopath who just needed the right legal excuse to exercise his rights. To me, the zoomed-in approach, the tenuous peace, and the escalation were more compelling than the solar-system-spanning earlier installments.
The Expanse tends to be the most openly philosophical at times of these three books. This time, the theme of the episode is that violence precedes society, and that the frontier precedes the law - it's just how it is. But even with this rather grim outlook on civilization, it is by far the least cynical of the three books listed above. The good guys won't always win in real life, but they always make a difference and they always try their hardest, and even when they make things worse, they show that we can do better. Being an audiobook and lighter in feel, it was a simple palate cleanser for me. (I've also heard that the series gets even better soon, so I'm very excited to proceed!)
Not a ton tying these reviews together, just wanted to note somewhere that it's kinda cool I wound up reading more westerns than I expected this year!
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