Why You'll Love This
A hired killer riding toward his next murder starts quietly wondering if he even wants to be a hired killer — and that tension makes this Western unlike anything else you've read.
- Great if you want: a darkly comic Western with unexpected philosophical weight
- The experience: deadpan and melancholy, with sudden lurches into violence and warmth
- The writing: deWitt writes in a flat, oddly formal voice that makes brutality quietly devastating
- Skip if: you want a fast-moving plot — this lingers in mood over momentum
About This Book
In the lawless frontier of 1851, two brothers ride west toward California with a single assignment: find a man named Hermann Kermit Warm and kill him. Eli and Charlie Sisters are professional killers by trade, but deWitt is far more interested in what lives beneath that—the complicated loyalty between siblings, the creeping desire for something different, and the peculiar sadness of men who have never questioned their path until now. It's a story about violence and tenderness existing in the same person, and about whether a life can change course once it's already well underway.
What sets this novel apart is deWitt's prose voice, which is deadpan, precise, and quietly devastating. Eli narrates with a strange innocence that makes the brutal world around him feel both comic and genuinely melancholy. The language has the rhythm of a fable—spare and unhurried—yet every chapter contains moments of unexpected strangeness that catch you off guard. DeWitt is working somewhere between literary Western and dark comedy, and the tension between those modes never resolves neatly, which is exactly what makes the book linger.
