Come on. With a title like that, you know you have to read this. If the story's anywhere near as good as the title, you're surely in for something pretty special - and fortunately, Six-Gun Snow White is every bit as great as it sounds.
It's essentially a mash-up of the original fairytale, American folklore and Westerns, and while I'll be the first to admit that such a combination is practically tailor-made to appeal to me, there's really no getting around that this is still a brilliant fantasy story in its own right. It transplants the familiar Snow White story to the American West, reimagining the heroine as a half-white, half-Native American girl whose mother dies shortly after she's born.
It sometimes doesn't feel like it, but this is inarguably a fantasy story - it's just that the ways that magic creeps into the tale would constitute spoilers, so we shan't discuss them here. Suffice to say, though, that the magic mirror does make an appearance. As I mentioned above, it feels more like a folk tale than anything else, which was perhaps inevitable given the combination of fairytale and the inherently mythic nature of the Old West.
Instead of the traditional huntsman sent after Snow White, here it's a bounty hunter and Pinkerton man - who ends up facing down his quarry in a Wild West showdown. Instead of seven dwarfs, Snow White finds a village run by seven outlaw women, one of whom is memorably described as being "pretty as a spring lamb and twice as likely to kick you in the face." It's remarkable how well the fairytale structure adapts to the new setting, but then again, the Old West is just America's folklore when you get down to it - when you think about it, it's actually a really good fit.
The prose style is hard to describe, except for saying that it's nigh-on impossible to read it without giving the narrator a Southern drawl in your head. It's wonderful, and it's exactly the sort of story you can imagine an ageing cattle rancher telling you while you're sat around a fire, eating beans out of a can. It's the voice that a fairytale like this ought to be told in, and it's this more than anything else that draws you in to the story and makes you feel like part of this world.
So, if you want prose that's beautifully evocative of the West, a new twist on the fairytale formula, or just a kick-ass gunslinging heroine, you should definitely take a look at Six-Gun Snow White. It's nominated for this year's Hugo Award for Best Novella, and it has my vote.