Quick Take
- Narration: Robin Miles is precisely the right narrator for this material, bringing Nettie Lonesome’s voice to life with a grit and warmth that honors both her vulnerability and her ferocity.
- Themes: Identity and self-determination at the margins, the weird west as a space for queerness and survival, colonial violence and Indigenous mythology
- Mood: Wild and dust-choked, with moments of genuine wonder breaking through the danger
- Verdict: Lila Bowen’s debut is one of the more original genre mashups of the past decade, and Robin Miles makes it sing.
I was halfway through my commute on a grey Tuesday when Nettie Lonesome killed her first vampire and the world stopped making sense in the best possible way. Wake of Vultures is the kind of book that disorients you pleasantly, where the genre furniture is familiar enough that you feel grounded but the arrangement keeps surprising you. I had not expected to spend a week thinking about a half-Black, half-Comanche teenager on the Texas frontier fighting supernatural monsters, but here we are, and I do not regret a moment of it.
Lila Bowen, the pen name for Delilah S. Dawson, is doing several things at once with this novel, and the remarkable thing is how rarely they interfere with each other. This is a weird western with genuine folkloric depth. It is a coming-of-age story where the protagonist’s gender identity is treated with matter-of-fact dignity rather than as a dramatic revelation. It is also a horror story with teeth and real stakes. The tonal juggling act is significant, and it mostly works. The 4.4 rating from nearly a thousand readers reflects a book with genuine defenders rather than universal approval, and that particularity is itself a recommendation.
Nettie Lonesome and the Art of Self-Definition
Reviewers consistently describe the character development as a standout element, and they are right. When we meet Nettie, she has been told her whole life what she is: ugly, unwanted, too dark, too strange, not quite belonging anywhere. The book does not give her a single transformative moment that suddenly resolves these wounds. Instead, Bowen shows her accumulating small evidences of her own worth, a good horse here, a fight won there, a friend she did not expect to have. The gender fluidity that runs through the narrative is handled the same way: Nettie does not make a speech about it. She simply moves through the world in ways that feel true to her, and the reader adjusts accordingly. This is the kind of organic character work that takes real craft.
Robin Miles narrates with a vocal quality that carries all of this without telegraphing it. She is not performing queerness or performing racial identity. She is inhabiting a specific young woman who is figuring out what kind of person she wants to be, and the performance has the quiet authority of someone who has done the interpretive work thoroughly before opening her mouth. Several listeners cited Miles as the reason they kept going through the early chapters when the world felt unfamiliar, and I understand exactly why. She provides a stable emotional center for a narrative that is intentionally and productively unpredictable.
The Folklore Beneath the Frontier
What separates Wake of Vultures from most paranormal westerns is the depth of its mythological sourcing. The monsters Nettie encounters are not just European vampire and werewolf archetypes transplanted to the frontier. Bowen draws on Indigenous American folklore, on Southwestern legends, on creatures that carry the weight of specific cultural contexts. This choice keeps the book from feeling like European horror wearing cowboy hats, and it gives the world a texture that becomes more interesting the further into the series you go. The research is worn lightly rather than displayed, which is exactly right.
Rachel Caine’s blurb describes it as a wild bronco of a read and the phrase is apt. The prose has velocity, the action sequences do not drag, and Bowen is not precious about putting her protagonist in genuine danger. The stakes feel real partly because Nettie’s survival is never assured by the conventions of the genre. She is not the kind of protagonist who is protected by narrative inevitability, and that uncertainty is what keeps the tension live across ten hours.
A Series Opener That Earns the Sequel
At just under eleven hours, Wake of Vultures ends in a place that opens outward rather than closing down. Some questions are resolved; others are pointedly left open. This is series construction done properly: enough satisfaction to feel complete, enough momentum to make Book 2 feel necessary rather than obligatory. Wesley Chu’s description of it as the weird west fantasy he never knew he had always wanted to read captures the experience accurately. The genre combination should not cohere as well as it does, and yet it does, and that against-the-odds success is part of the book’s specific pleasure.
The only consistent complaint in reviews concerns the ending’s abruptness, and there is some justice to that observation. Listeners who prefer full resolution may feel slightly shortchanged. But the open ending is a feature of the series structure rather than a failure of craft, and the questions it leaves unanswered are interesting enough to warrant continuing into the Shadow series. The German reviewer who called it a great series and praised the protagonist’s development in the fantasy genre as standing out is responding to something real.
Who Should Listen, Who Should Skip
If you have read and loved anything in the weird west subgenre, this belongs on your list. If you are an LGBTQ+ reader looking for fantasy that treats queer and nonbinary identity as a normal dimension of a character rather than a special topic, Wake of Vultures is one of the better examples available. Listeners who want traditional western conventions satisfied, or who prefer their fantasy without horror elements, may find the tonal range jarring. For everyone else, this is ten and a half hours of something genuinely its own, narrated by someone who understands it completely.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Wake of Vultures work as a standalone, or do you need to commit to the full Shadow series?
It functions as a complete story with its own arc, though the ending opens toward Book 2. You can listen to it independently, but the world Bowen builds is compelling enough that most listeners continue with the series.
How explicitly is Nettie’s gender identity addressed? Is it central to the plot or background texture?
It is woven into the narrative as part of who Nettie is, not as a special topic or dramatic arc. The book treats it with matter-of-fact dignity, and it is present and meaningful without being the book’s sole focus.
How much does Robin Miles’s narration shape the experience of this particular story?
Significantly. Several listeners credit Miles as the reason they connected with the early chapters. Her performance provides emotional consistency for a narrative that shifts tonally between horror, humor, and coming-of-age warmth.
Is the folkloric content in this book drawn from actual Indigenous traditions, or is it entirely invented?
Bowen draws on a mix of genuine Southwestern and Indigenous American folklore alongside invented elements. The result has more mythological texture than standard paranormal westerns, though it is a work of fiction rather than ethnographic documentation.
