Cowboy Ending by Adam Knight

An excellent story all around.  I wasn't even aware of just how long it was until I checked it's length bar on my kindle after the fact.  The story reads quickly and maintains a high degree of interest throughout.  It is somewhere between a superhero origin story and an urban fantasy.  Though I tend to include superhero fiction as a kind of urban fantasy.


The conflict is personal with hints at a larger scale.  The character is focused on the people that relate to his life more than anything else.  Even being a basically good person, he is still realistically self-centered, not in the nature of thinking he's better than everybody, but in the nature that he simply doesn't think of things outside his normal life.  Which is realistic.  Most people don't go around really thinking about what happens to people they don't know.  They might see something on the news and talk about how something should be done, but they don't really connect to the event outside the news reports.  Joe's focus on his personal concerns, petty or otherwise, that happen to dovetail with deeper evils, is very refreshingly real.

The supernatural elements of the story are both immediately obvious to the reader and yet subtle enough that it's easy to see how everyone in the story, including the main character, could overlook it.  The characters transformation over the course of the book and the development of these powers is one of the most interesting facets of the story. 

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/330803