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Sir Barken Hyena, one of the uncouth contributors to Uncouth Reflections just posted a generous and thoughtful review of Fourteen Western Stories, saying, in part:

You’ll find no purple prose here, no convoluted thesaurus odysseys, though he will throw in an occasional flash of eloquence when it’s needed. He can do it, he just doesn’t need to. He gets out of the way like a good writer should and lets the stories carry you off. You feel like you’re listening to some dude around a campfire telling a great tale.

Another requirement that’s met: unpredictability. You get a sense of where things are headed but you’re never right. And where the stories end up often casts a new light on events prior, so there’s a nice layered quality to the action. These stories echo around your mind long after you’ve finished reading them.

. . . there’s a beautiful romanticism under the horror and senseless violence in Fonvielle’s world. Rather than a world that’s all strange with no meaning, it’s world where sometimes, by chance and by struggle, things really do work out O.K. And then others times, not. And that makes for a very balanced and full reading experience. These stories fire on all cylinders.