Paradise Sky by Joe R. Landsdale

 

It's mostly a Western, yeah; and it's definitely a picaresque with a first-person narrator who's pretty upfront about not being completely reliable; but it's Landsdale, and he can really write--both in the sense of story and in the sense of phrase-turning--and it's really worth reading. Lots of racist shit in here, since the POV's a Black man, but it's handled reasonably well. It's set in the Old West (part of it even happens in fucking Deadwood) but it's a very modern take, takes the piss out of some of the dime novel mythmaking that's ossified into how people tend to think it really was. Given where the end goes, arguably a bit of a bildungsroman, too, though that might be oversimplifying the novel. Very, very good.