Josh Rountree has a real knack for blending the American frontier with the grotesque and the fantastical. His last outing, The Legend of Charlie Fish, fused the dark myth of Creature from the Black Lagoon with dusty six-shooters and swinging saloon doors, twisting classic horror into Western mythos. Now he’s digging even deeper into the grave.
The Unkillable Frank Lightning is a raw, lyrical tale of resurrection and reckoning — where Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein stares down the sun-bleached, haunted landscapes of Cormac McCarthy. It’s soaked in sorrow, blood, and the long shadows cast by love and war.
In 1879, Catherine Coldbridge — doctor, occultist, widow — would not let death claim her husband. When a Sioux war party took him, she reached beyond the veil, calling back Private Frank Humble from the grave by forbidden rites. But the man who returned was no longer her Frank.
Twenty-five years on, Frank Humble is a legend, known now as Frank Lightning, star of a Wild West show. Catherine, haunted by what she wrought, rides back to Texas with a posse and a grim purpose: to end what should never have been begun.
Ahead of the book’s July 15 release, CinemaChords caught up with Rountree to talk through a story where grief invokes far more than just the dead.
We delve into how The Unkillable Frank Lightning is as much about the monsters lurking in the shadows as those shaped by sorrow — souls shattered by war, love, and loss, scraping by through hardscrabble lives on the outer edges of a brutal world.
Watch the full interview below as Josh Rountree reveals the dark heart of his latest novel and the real-life wounds that inspired this haunting tale of love, death, and redemption.
