The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu

What a banger. I loved it. The writing was excellent. The magical realism induced the perfect level of weirdness into the revenge plot. The characters were pretty flat but fit super well. And an old-school western was so much fun to read.

I also thought it did a solid job breaking up a whitewashed Western genre with its MC and the sequences in the book while still following genre conventions. I read the book feeling like it was a Western even though it was breaking the stereotypes of the genre. It reminded me of something Neil Gaiman said where genre fiction is defined by what people would be disappointed if a book did not do. In that regard, this book did a great job both hitting the feeling of a western and subverting its norms.

I also was reading through some reviews that basically said it was a ‘missed opportunity' to dive into some of the Chinese heritage and stories of the railroad. I can see that but I subscribe to the idea that stories just exist and we have personal relations with them. Its not on the author to write a story for an agenda. Thats not on them.

Besides the cover is dope.

This is a quiet western with some fantastical elements and a revenge plot. It's also a bit of a historical fiction since it takes place at the time of the building the Central Pacific Railroad line. The story left me wanting more character development and plot, but I have no regrets reading this debut from Lin.

Ming Tsu is a sharpshooting enforcer who carries a rail spike sharpened to a mirror finish and a list of names he's killing his way through to ultimately reunite with his one true love. In author Tom Lin's hands the story clips along as Ming traverses the West leaving a bloody trail of bodies.

Ming is Chinese American, orphaned as an infant and raised by the ruthless Silas Root. His ethnicity makes for a unique perspective on the traditional Western. At one point he slips in close to a target by joining the Chinese immigrants who made up the majority of the workforce on the Central Pacific line. The $10K bounty on his head is advertised with a barely recognizable wanted sign that clearly illustrates that the predominantly white population can barely recognize him from any other Chinaman. He is perfectly invisible and equally ruthless.

There's enough meat there to render a Tarantino-esque revenge narrative but Lin ups the ante when Ming comes across a travelling circus filled with miracles. There is the tattooed, shape-shifting Pacific Islander, the deaf and dumb young boy who can speak directly into other people's heads, the Navajo that can erase memories, the fireproof woman and the blind prophet who can determine your time of passing.

And therein is my beef with the story. Aside from the fact that there wasn't a single sunrise or sunset that didn't warrant some sort of mention, Lin relegates these fantastical characters to mere color. This could have been a gritty Wild West X-Men story, an elaborate heist perpetrated by this motley crew of mutants, or an X-Force style killing team reaping wrongdoers across Nevada and California. But a small gripe in an otherwise pulpy bit of fun that I just flew through.