Adventures of the Dynamite Kid

Francis Blackstone, the young hopeless romantic and charming dime-novel star of frontier Arizona, “has never found it easy to discuss his own place in the world or his aimless wanderings or, most of all, the decisions he makes.” And as the protagonist of Tyler Enfield’s new novel, he sure doesn’t make it easy for us — the readers — to discuss his place in the Old West, circa 1888, or his intertextual wanderings toward a town that “somehow jumps about on a map, appearing both here and there depending on who’s looking.” Trying to discuss Francis and his band of gunslingers, trying to understand their place within this story and within the mythology and fact of the frontier, trying to follow the rich and temporally shifting allusions that Enfield’s equally enigmatic narrator weaves throughout these pages — well, as Twain would say, “There’s millions in it.”

Like Rum-Drunk Angels is a difficult Western to pin down, which seems appropriate for a genre that’s long...