Ghost Train Carnival

"A Faustian legal thriller wrapped in supernatural horror - and it works brilliantly."

Sam Quick killed twenty-three men in Redemption. Now he saves people for a living - specifically, people desperate enough to sign contracts with Hell itself. When a mother begs him to rescue her son from Eclipse Junction, a carnival existing outside normal geography where the Devil trades miracles for pieces of your soul, Sam returns to the one place no sane person visits twice.

But Lucifer doesn't want Sam dead. He wants Sam employed.

Peterson has crafted something genuinely original here - a supernatural western where the gunfights happen in courtrooms and the bullets are legal arguments. The premise sounds almost absurd: a former gunslinger turned contract lawyer challenging the Devil's fine print. Yet Peterson sells it completely, building a world where soul contracts operate with the mechanical precision of corporate law and the horror of eternal damnation hides behind professional courtesy and cream-colored parchment.

The novel's real genius is its central trap. Every victory Sam wins strengthens Hell's legal system. Every exploit he finds helps them close loopholes. Every principle of fairness he forces Lucifer to acknowledge makes the machinery of damnation more legitimate. Sam isn't fighting the Devil, he's refining him. And the deeper Sam descends into Eclipse Junction's true operations, pavilions of extracted emotions, gardens of stolen names, vaults where existence itself writhes in glass containers, the more Peterson reveals the horror was never in the contracts. It was in what happens after you sign.

Dark, propulsive, and disturbingly thoughtful about the nature of consent, power, and the systems we build to justify taking from the desperate. You'll never read the fine print the same way again.