Take, for instance, Mrs. Mildred Benjamin, secret writer of suspense tales for Gallagher's Illustrated Weekly, who spends her days setting type for Tombstone's daily newspaper, The Nugget. When the Earps and Holliday catch one of the supposed stagecoach robbers and put him in jail, Mildred quickly becomes involved in a jailbreak. At the urging of her boss, Mr. Henry, Mildred gets the mysterious Fox to help free the man before either Earp or Holliday can stop him from talking.

However, things take a turn for the worse the next day, when the man's severed arm shows up outside of the newspaper's office, much to the horror of both Mildred and Fox. In the man's hand is a strange silver wire. When Fox takes it to Lung, Lung tells him it's "a warning sent from one knowledgeable man to another." A sorceror's warning—and anyone who has knowledge of it will be unable to hide that fact if they touch it. Despite Lung's warning to throw it out, Fox keeps it and goes looking for trouble—in the form of a local poker game. He throws the wire in the pot, hoping to get a reaction from the players, but gets only a measured stare from Earp upon seeing it. Does Earp know what it is? Just what kind of shadow war is being fought behind the scenes here?

Curly Bill Brocius doesn't make things less tense by pretending to shoot at Doc Holliday as an April Fool's Day joke. Drunk, he accuses Holliday of being involved in the stagecoach holdup. Meanwhile, the Guilded Age Mining Company is trying to buy up everybody's land, using a heavy-handed approach. Something odd is going on in Tombstone, and it's not quite of this world. As Mildred and Fox get more and more entangled in what is, as the title suggests, a deadly battle for territory, more bodies turn up and things only get stranger.

Brilliance from an underappreciated talent

Emma Bull has conjured up a truly great American novel from the reality and myth of the Old West. From romance to gunplay, political intrigue to betrayal, Bull writes in a seamless, beautifully muscular style that will captivate any reader. Some scenes, like Fox's taming of a skittish colt for one of the Earp brothers, are masterpieces of attention to detail, while others, especially a confrontation between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday, are nothing short of incandescent. Many passages deserve to be quoted at length, but I'll limit myself to this one section, where Holliday learns that Earp has used his Kate as a ploy in an interrogation connected to the stagecoach robbery:

Anger was like a wildfire in him, the kind that skimmed through the dry grass unnoticed until it met the trees, to explode up the trunks and leap from bough to bough. ... Outside the moon was up, full and bright and low in the east. Wyatt was untying his horse from the porch rail. Doc took hold of the reins just below the bit.

"Do I bandy your wife's name about?" Doc said. The fire in his chest had grown until he could barely speak above a whisper.

Wyatt's back was to the moonlight; Doc couldn't see his face. "I don't know. Do you?"

"If I did, what would I get from you?"

"I think you know." From his voice, Wyatt was smiling.

"Then tell me what you deserve for lying about Kate."

A gust of cold wind rattled the scrub around them.

"You're not angry because I made use of Kate," Wyatt said calmly. "Besides, I did her no harm." He took hold of the reins below Doc's hand. Doc didn't let go.

"I don't believe you gave a damn about that."

Wyatt stepped forward. He occluded the moon, so that the black shape of him was rimmed in silver. The night wind whistled through brush and boards and every opening that might hum with it. There was a knife hidden in Doc's sleeve ... But he felt helpless even so.

"I didn't give a damn," Wyatt answered, cold as snow. "If I have to hurt everyone in the world to protect what's mine, I will do it like a shot ..." Wyatt drew his reins out of Doc's fingers, backed his horse, and led him off toward the corral.

Doc clutched the porch rail and stared out at the silver-and-black landscape. The air felt thin in his lungs, searing as he dragged it in. He'd thought he was the wildfire. Now he knew he was only the tree.

I have to admit that historical characters fleshed out in historical novels often seem stilted to me. I am also not the biggest fan of westerns, perhaps because some of them are formulaic. However, in reading Territory, I found that Bull overcame all of my reservations about both westerns and historical characters. In fact, perhaps the most astonishing thing about Bull's accomplishment in Territory has nothing to do with the fantasy element. She has managed to portray Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp and the rest of her historical figures as deadly, funny, laconic, real and yet also larger than life. These men have a sense of their own place in history. That she has managed to do this while placing them in such an imaginative and lively context, with the made-up characters fully as fascinating, is even more impressive.

As the plot threads Bull has set up in the first half of the novel come to their climax in the last act, as the true nature of certain characters becomes clear—and as I realized just how much (often chilling) fun I was having while reading—I slowly came to realize that Territory is one of my favorite books of the last few years.