On the Nature of the Gods

Jeb is one of the toughest men alive, and he demands respect. When the cops find semen on his blankets, and it isn't even human, he sets out on a trail of vengeance. In company with his intuitive horse Rooster, it leads him to the evil Dr. Schmitt-Rottluff, the gaslight era's virtuoso of illicit cloning and mind-bending manipulation of the human genome. Rife with the bizarre juxtaposition of psycho-sexual elements, ‘On the Nature of the Gods’ is a superb parody of the steam-punk weird western with elements of bedroom comedy genre. Undefeated in a hundred and thirty-eight bouts, Jeb Snead may be the toughest man in a totally plastic world. It's too bad he doesn't have much of a sense of humour and might even be a little insecure. Rufe Golan is the son of a rich man, a smooth-talker and an inveterate foot-fetishist. Hope Ng, starved for attention or entertainment, is heading to San Francisco to live with her grandfather when her wagon train is massacred. The buxom but leggy Miss Muriel Kitty, a professional working woman-cat-thing, and wise in the ways of the world, provides a valuable service in frontier society. The evil Doctor Schmitt-Rottluff surrounds himself with willing tools and useful fools, some of them the product of a little too much inbreeding in test-tubes. Chapley, his alleged black nephew and Waylon, his acknowledged ‘taurian son, Nazi gryphons, erudite Injuns who read Latin and mischievous spirits who just want to see what happens next, fill out a never-before-seen, all-star cast in Louis B. Shalako’s killer debut in this genre. Who doesn’t like telempathic horses and equine romance, or casually-stated themes of miscegenation, and illicit cloning?