Review: "Merkabah Rider: High Planes Drifter" by Edward M. Erdelac

 

Merkabah Rider: High Planes Drifter by Edward M. Erdelac 2018 reviewed by Mike Baker    We don’t know Merkabah Rider’s real name because knowing a person’s name gives you the power to control them. The Rider, as he calls himself, is a former student of the Sons of Essenes, a Hassidic mystical order, where the Rider’s teacher, Adon, murdered everyone in the sect. The Rider escaped only because he was away fighting in the American Civil War. To say the Rider is an outcast—and for more reasons than just because his mystical order is gone—is an understatement. The High Planes Drifter, by Elderac, is composed of five independent but intertwined stories. The first is Blood Libel where the Rider walks into the western town of Delirium Tremens hunting for his heretical teacher Adon, but ends-up protecting the last of a Jewish settlement from the worshippers of Molech. In The Dust Devils, the Rider battles Mexican banditos, a voudon sorcerer, and a small army of zombies. Hells Hired Gun, the Rider goes up against Medgar Tooms who slaughters everything in his path, avenging the death of his wife and unborn son. The Rider visits a whorehouse in the mining town of Tik Tok where he meets The Nightjar Women who hold the secret to his former master’s location. The last story, The Schomer Express, is about a midnight train being stalked through the desert by a flesh-eating monster. A monster that will destroy every soul on the train if the Rider fails to destroy it. The High Planes Drifter is definitely a cowboy book, but of the weird variety. His Volcanic pistol is deadly in this world and the next.... The stories are episodic but they also thematically link around the Rider’s hunt for his teacher Adon, the murderer of babies, and a thing called the Time of the Inclusion with some foreshadowing of future stories. It took me a while to get the rhythm of the stories as the human bad guys aren’t the point. I don’t read fantasy so I kept expecting tension to ratchet up sooner than Erdelac planned as he moves the reader towards a darkness beyond the veil. I confess I’m just not use to working in two planes of existence simultaneously. The Rider is complex and not invulnerable plus he has a philosophical backstory which infuses each of the stories with more meaning then a usual western. He’s an anti-hero but not like Edge or Fargo. He’s more of a crankier, more literate Buchanan. He just wants to be left alone to brood, but civilians inhabited by demons keep messing with him. Also, there’s a lot of yiddish and hebrew which meant extensive use of the glossary which, in retrospect, I would have read a few times before tackling the book. I still don’t enjoy science fiction and/or fantasy much but I enjoyed this book enough to buy the next book before I’d finished it.

Click here for the Kindle version or here for the paperback of The High Planes Drifter at Amazon.