The Legend of Charlie Fish (Josh Rountree)

The Legend of Charlie Fish
Josh Rountree
Tachyon
Fiction, Fantasy/Western
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: A carpenter in Galveston off the Texas coast, Floyd never intended to return to the small, mean-spirited swamp town of Old Cypress until his drunkard father needed burying. He certainly never intended to take on two orphaned children he found near the church, outcasts whose parents had been burned alive for witchcraft... but he knows just how miserable a place that town is, and it's not like he could leave them there. On the way back to Galveston with his new charges Nellie and Hank, Floyd picks up the strangest companion of all: a man with fish-scale skin and gills, held captive by a pair of thuggish scoundrels Professor Finn and Kentucky Jim. Rescuing the man - dubbed "Charlie Fish" by Nellie, who can hear the "whisper talk" of people's minds and communicate with the stranger - earns the travelers a pair of relentless enemies, who will follow them all the way to Galveston to reclaim their future meal ticket and exact revenge... but another danger waits for them all, a gathering storm the likes of which the progressive island city has never seen before.

REVIEW: A pinch of The Creature from the Black Lagoon, a dash of True Grit, and the devastating storm that nearly wiped Galveston off the map in 1900 come together in this novella, a quick-reading "weird west" tale with some interesting ideas and characters.
With alternating chapters, Nellie - daughter of a minor witch, inheritor of the family gift she dubs "whisper talk" that lets her see the minds of others (and occasionally influence them) - and Floyd spin a story of family lost and found, failures and regrets and redemption, and survival against all manner of storms. The characters, while interesting, sometimes feel a bit flat and story-shaped, particularly the baddies Finn and Jim but also with key players like the peculiar Charlie Fish, who seems to have large holes in his history and adventures that are barely hinted at. Everyone has suffered traumas and betrayals, which helps bind them into an impromptu (if temporary, for a few of them) family, as well as the shared threats of the scoundrels and the massive storm... a storm nobody else in Galveston seems to take seriously, smug in the preparations that have seen them stand against previous bad weather. They are all soon reminded that, despite modern measures and human hubris, the ocean always wins, and even those few who survive pay a steep toll and acquire lifelong scars.
For all that it read fast and was reasonably satisfying, it did have some odd little wobbles, like a table whose legs don't quite sit square on the floor. I couldn't tell if the story was too short to quite explore what it wanted to explore or too long for what was, at the heart, a short story with filler. The baddies seemed flat and almost cartoonish, and even Charlie Fish was largely an enigma for being the catalyst of so much that went on, veering from oddly passive to terrifyingly protective. Still, I mostly enjoyed it for what it was, even with its minor flaws that held it back from being truly great.

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