The Dead Spend No Gold: Bigfoot and the California Gold Rush

A Virginia Reed Adventure: Virginia Reed Adventures, Book 3

By: Duncan McGeary

Narrated by: Jennifer Sterling

Virginia Reed survived the Donner Party Werewolves only to find herself in a life and death struggle with a creature out of nightmares. When gold is discovered, California becomes flooded with miners who push Indian tribes from their lands, or kill them if they refuse to leave. But there is a creature in the mountains that won't be so easily removed, who reacts to the invasion of his territory by slaying everyone who trespasses.

©2018 Duncan McGeary (P)2021 Duncan McGeary

Critic reviews

"Duncan McGeary is an accomplished writer who knows how to tell a great story." (Mike Richardson, Emmy award winning producer and founder of Dark Horse Comics)

"There's monsters in them thar hills, and the weird west was never wilder. The Dead Spend No Gold is a fine tale to be spun around some High Sierra campfire - as long as you don't mind lying awake all night, wondering what that sound was off there in the trees..." (Jim Cornelius, Frontier Partisans)

Potential but condescending.

This story had some real potential but the execution was seriously lacking. Honestly, if I was a woman I would be more insulted by the female characters than enthused. Feather, the Native American girl, becomes as much of a cliché as Tonto is in the “Lone Ranger” stories. Up to and including the strained “King James” style English she speaks for totally nonsensical reasons. The protagonist, Virginia Reed, is a 15 year old girl who has recently survived the horrific ordeal of the “Donnor Party” during their ill fated trek west. The author has reimagined the historical tragedy as a werewolf story in his first book of the series. You don’t need to read the first book to follow this book though. The point is that Virginia emerged from the first book as a mystical hero with special powers to fight monsters. In other words, Buffy the Vampire Slayer in 1850s California. Slowly, but surely the author employs every formulaic cliché of the “hero’s journey” including her father’s gifted Bowie Knife, lightsaber, and a wise Kanobe like hotel owner that helps her to realize her divine monster slayer destiny. The standard leftist ideological diatribe is woven incessantly into the narrative. As usual white men and their civilization is the cause for all the evil and destruction. The author includes a secondary character called “the preacher.” Preacher is a hypocritical miner who rattles of scripture constantly while he himself is knee deep in all the white male atrocity. That’s exactly how I might describe this author. I was hoping for a good “Bigfoot” story but instead I got a “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” dramatized rendition of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” Your intelligence is gonna be insulted early and often. In other words, an anti capitalist anti American and environmentalists indoctrination Buffy story.