Guest Review: Cowboy Church by J.L. Mackey

Mazer Rackham Jr. reviews a deep south mystery novella.

Aristo’s foreword: Mazer Rackham Jr.(@TheNextMazer) is a friend of mine who both writes and reads for hire under various names. He enjoyed this book and asked if he could write a review. I hope everybody enjoys it!

The Coen's No Country For Old Men adaptation contains a great, oft-forgotten bit of dialogue. It comes when Llewelyn Moss has to explain to his wife why he’s about to take a jug of water back to the location of a blown drug deal to give to a Mexican who is, at this point in the story, almost certainly dead:

What’re you going to do?

I’m fixin’ to do something dumber than hell, but I’m goin’ anyways. If I don’t come back, tell Mother I love her.

You’re mother’s dead, Llewelyn.

Well, then I’ll tell her myself.

He knows there’s no real point. He knows he might accomplish nothing more than becoming another corpse out in the scrub.

But, well… it is what it is.

This same quality, the feeling and rhythm of it is what it is, permeates the text of JL Mackey’s new novella The Cowboy Church.

“I don’t know. I’ll just have to feel it out. You know I have a way with people.”

“You literally haven’t met a stranger in what, a decade?”

“I’m feelin’ lucky.”

“This is a terrible idea. Wait here. I’ll pull the truck up.”

As with most crime stories, the setup is simple to explain. The cover gets you halfway there – an empty pill bottle sits next to a handful of cigarette butts pincushioned into its upturned cap, while a couple of bullets lie ominously nearby. Hardbitten people always return to the same handful of solutions to their problems, and the characters populating Mackey’s 75-page tale are hardbitten as hell.

Chief among them is Ezra Ballinger, the crippled owner of “The Cowboy Church,” a local watering hole in an unnamed town deep in the Deep South. If you live below the Mason-Dixon, you know a place like this. Worn-down people live there in rundown houses haphazardly strewn between farms and rusty factories. Ballinger comes from a farming family, but he doesn’t work the land with them on account of they don’t get along anymore. Instead, he spends time with his pain pills and booze.

Still, family is family, and when a ruthless industrialist poisons both his kin and the land they live on, Ezra realizes that blood is thicker than whiskey and sets about making things right, in the only way he knows how.

Showing up felt like penance for some unknown sin, and driving away never absolved him of it, though he always hoped it was the last time.

It’s simple enough, as plots go. Don’t pick it up hoping for a knotty noir. Those tend to focus on desperate people moving about in lies and shadows and mystery. The Cowboy Church isn't in the business of obscuring things, and its characters drag on well past the point of desperation.

Mackey writes drama that happens right in front of you, plain as day. A lot of his scenes are just a couple of pages. It doesn’t take much time for a guy like Ezra to decide what he’s thinking, or be put in his place by a friend when they finally decide to give him a piece of their mind.

“Fine. Go do something wild. Go get yourself killed. See if I care.”

This focused approach suits a novella, of course, but it also brings a distinct “Southern-ness” to the text. Ezra’s conflict with his father and sister skips over their backstory, and his relationship with the Cowboy Church and its customers stays in the margins. But men in the South don’t talk much anyway. They know there’s such a thing as Fate. It is what it is.

This lack of pretension is the book's main selling point. It means we get to focus on the characters - each of them specific and believable and relevant to the story. The whole thing escalates naturally from start to finish, and you won't want to rush the process since Mackey pares down each scene down until every line means something. Could be a refreshing change if you’ve been on a run of books that lean too heavily on twists and backstory to glitz up their narratives.

The Cowboy Church will run you seven bucks, can be had on both Kindle and paper, and can be easily read in a single-sitting. You should snag it now if you want to check out a new voice from kudzu country who can spin a yarn without asking for too much of your money or time.

Grab The Cowboy Church here on Amazon

The author, J.L Mackey, can be found on Twitter at @based_fyodor and writes here at his own substack, linked below: