Kit Carson, RN, is a single mom nurse trying to save lives and find love in America's New Wild West. A five episode series, with potential for expansion.
Fiction/satire/medical/
Collison’s imaginative plot about the dystopian state of affairs in New Wild West health care will seem downright plausible to contemporary readers. The details ring true, especially about the burdens placed on nurses, which isn’t surprising considering Collison worked as a registered nurse herself for over a decade, specializing in emergency and critical care. Her characters are memorable, especially the crooked sheriff in town, who resembles a recent occupant of the Oval Office right down to the pejorative and racist names he applies to the virus, his false bravado about his health, and his thirst for retribution. Witty dialogue provokes chuckles in many places, and the milieu, which combines western tropes with the American present of NDAs and online college classes.
However, odd typography choice unnecessarily detracts from the serial’s unusual pleasures, as do many of the willfully peculiar character names (such as Balmy Wether, Stormy Wether, Calamity, and Big Dick in particular.) Sentences like scattering atoms sometimes make following the narrative difficult. As this is a serial story, the entire plot isn’t contained within these pages — leaving readers who haven’t read the previous entries struggling to keep up. Fans of Collison who have been keeping up with the serial will enjoy this episode; those who haven’t are likely to be confused.
Takeaway: This western serial’s sly take on the events of the day will engage fans of satiric storytelling, but is best read from the series’ start.
Great for fans of: George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Terry Pratchett, Al Capp.
Production grades
Cover: B-
Design and typography: B-
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: B-
Marketing copy: B
The Colorado Independent Publishers Association awarded a bronze prive to Nurse Kit Carson's Knife & Gun Club; the first five episodes anthology.
Meet Kit Carson, a single-mother nurse who packs heat. She works the night shift at the emergency room, and her hospital has just been taken under siege by a shooter. More or less, this is the crux of Linda Collison's satirical Friday Night Knife & Gun Club, the first in a series of stories that will eventually become the complete Kit Carson Knife & Gun Club — a fictionalized dystopian memoir, set in America's new wild West.
- Tristan Niskanen
The title of the series pays homage to the emergency room at Denver General, now Denver Health, affectionately known as the "knife and gun club" because of the large volume of patients who came in with gun- and knife-related injuries. In 1989, Eugene Richards photographed scenes inside Denver General for his book, The Knife and Gun Club. That book, along with B.P. Reiter's Saturday Night Knife and Gun Club and Samuel Shem's satirical novel The House of God, all influenced Collison's own writing.
Collison was born in Baltimore but moved to Colorado in her twenties and raised her kids here. She worked as a registered nurse in Denver for over ten years, specializing in critical care and emergency at hospitals across the metro area; she says being on the night shift in the emergency room is like living in your own world. The characters in her stories are an amalgamation of many of the people Collison worked with and worked on during her tenure as a nurse.
