A trilogy of short stories set in a version of the wild west where the dead suddenly start coming back to life for no discernible reason sounded pretty good to me on paper, but the end result was very mixed. Dixon and Campbell provide a story at the beginning of the uprising, and then two follow-ups set over the course of the next 15 years that further the world in which people now have to live.

The main problem is that the first story, The Lost Party is significantly better than the two that follow it and it's also the shortest of the three. It is a genuinely engaging tale of a man determined to learn the fate of a large party of people who have disappeared in the middle of nowhere. The second and third stories, Feud and The Last Rider are more typical westerns, with the zombies taking a backseat to proceedings. Given I was looking for and expecting zombie-caused mayhem, this was a disappointment. Especially when the zombies seemed to have inexplicable aversions to anyone who was a POV character in the stories. It also did not help that both of these latter tales were in need of a better copy editor; there were far too many typos and grammatical errors to be considered a properly professional publication.

So, a great opening tale, and two somewhat disappointing (though far from terrible) stories does a very average rating make.

2.5 Miraculous Survivals Amid a Horde of the Undead for Red Dust: The Fall.