Yeah, yeah, the better half has already reviewed this at the Nameless Zine but I wanted to hurl out my perspectives on it too, because it's something I've been looking forward to for a long time.

For those not immersed in local fandom here in the Phoenix metropolitan area, Gilead is known as an artist. He paints a lot of amazing sword and sorcery scenes, whether featuring the scantily clad warriors and damsels we might expect or the audience-favourite, Ned the Barbarian, whose usually naked butt has even generated a day. Monday is always Bun Day on Gilead's live painting sessions, a treat for the ladies to counter the other treats for the gentlemen. I'm also a fan of his charcoals and his tentacles and his skulls and his Universal monsters and let's just say that there's a lot of his original art hanging around our house.

While Gilead doesn't tend to be thought of as is a storyteller, but anyone who attends our CoKoCon Conversations in ConSuite online socials (hint: the last Sunday of every month on Discord, so check the CoKoCon website for the link) will highlight that he tells great stories. Most of them are true, I believe, unlike the stories in this book, which are very much "tall tales from the backwoods", urban legends that have sprung up in the nonexistent environs of Bosky Creek, a backwoods town hidden somewhere in Arizona that's not far adrift from the rural pockets of Old England where fairy tales always begin.

And so, while I heartily recommend every single Kickstarter and Indiegogo that Gilead sets up for his art, because they're all well worth your support, this is the book I've been waiting for. It has an enticing array of his art, highly varied in style and subject, but every one of them is there to bring life to a tall tale, that's so alive in its telling that it seems almost unfair to write it down. This isn't a book to read so much as it's a book to read aloud to yourself, by firelight with a cold glass of pink lemonade within easy reach. And, of course, once you've read it to yourself, you should read it to everyone in your family circle, starting with the little kids but definitely not excluding the old folks.

The biggest success of the book is in how these stories burst off the pages to float around us until we believe that they've been passed down from generation to generation and it's now fallen to us to pass them on once more. Whether Gilead is talking about horny toads or Arizona grass dragons, Bradshaw Mountain gold snappers or sand dolphins, we kind of know, deep in our heart, that all of this is nonsense and he's just pulling our leg, but we also feel that it oughtn't to be, that these are stories that should be real, that we'd like nothing more than to shed forty years and wander off to play in the woods and see which of these creatures pops up to play with us.

In fact, I think Gilead missed a marketing gimmick. He should have made it very clear that at least one of these stories is absolutely positively true and at least one is absolutely positively false and then let us loose to figure out which is which and what lies between. For me, I might pick The Door as the true story, if only I wasn't lunching with Widow Hendricks tomorrow. Then again, it might be the scandal that sprang up around Miss Willow. Who knows? Only Gilead and he's not telling.

The biggest failure of the book is that many of these stories are just glimpses. The best ones to my way of thinking are the longer ones; that run for four or five pages and allow Gilead to truly get his teeth into them. The shorter pieces, that run a page or less, are good too, but I found myself eager to read on, only to find that the next page began the next story. Given the large font size, the four or five page stories aren't particularly long either but they give Gilead a firm opportunity to  flesh them out and, frankly, paint a scene with words rather than ink, charcoal or watercolours.

Everyone down here in Phoenix knows that Gilead is a glorious artist. I'm so happy that he agreed to become our Artist in Residence at CoKoCon, where he'll live paint in the Art Show and chat with anyone who pops in to say hi and see how he's doing and what he's bringing to life on his easel. The words, "and that's as true a tale as ever was told down Bosky Creek" will surely resonate within the room and ought to act as a rallying cry to anyone who wants to hear a story. And who doesn't?

However, I'd dearly like to see him write more of them down, illustrated of course, and share them in crowdfunded efforts to fans who want to read Gilead's work just as much as look at it. For now, I believe I heard tell that there's a map of a special vintage that marks the location of Bosky Creek and, if I can only track it down, I can drive up there and wander around those backwoods to see the snipe and the chalupacabras. I believe it's a left turn at Prescott and then somewhere over seven mountains and seven rivers. Or something like that. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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