I enjoy a well-written Western and feel that it is an underrated and all too often dismissed genre, so I was pleased to discover this re-issue on NetGalley of The Hell Bent Kid, considered one of the best twenty five Western novels of all time. I can see why it is highly regarded, as it’s a “good yarn” but it’s not the sort of Western I like, concentrating too much as it does on action rather than character. It tells the story of young Tot Lohman who is unrelentingly pursued by the brothers of a man he has inadvertently killed. As he flees across the arid and dangerous New Mexico territory he has all the adventures you might expect from the genre, but I found these tedious after a while, and not always convincing. So for me this was just middling sort of Western tale and not one of the best.