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Category: Weird Western

New Treasures: Ceaseless West

New Treasures: Ceaseless West

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Ceaseless West-smallWhile I was pulling together my Wednesday post on Beneath Ceaseless Skies 171, I noticed that editor Scott H. Andrews had just released his latest BCS Anthology, Ceaseless West, a terrific-looking collection of weird western tales — which includes a short story by Black Gate‘s own Matthew David Surridge. I’m a big fan of weird westerns, and this one looks very promising indeed.

A fallen-angel gunslinger must defend a dusty town against hellspawn….

Living trains roam wild off their tracks….

A pious teetotaler widow faces a town’s scorn and a dying boy’s frantic spirit….

An eternal warrior marshal is drawn through time to face that which must be faced….

These and other awe-inspiring Weird Western stories await in Ceaseless West: Weird Western Stories from Beneath Ceaseless Skies Online Magazine, a new ebook anthology of eighteen Weird Western stories from Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Ceaseless West features stories by Kenneth Mark Hoover, Peter Darbyshire, Mark Teppo, E. Catherine Tobler, Aurealis Award finalist and winner Ian McHugh, Shirley Jackson Award finalist Gemma Files, and Hugo Award finalist Saladin Ahmed.

Previous anthologies from BCS include five volumes of Best of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and the steampunk collection Ceaseless Steam.

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Vintage Treasures: Razored Saddles, edited by Joe R. Lansdale

Vintage Treasures: Razored Saddles, edited by Joe R. Lansdale

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Razored Saddles-smallI was at the Windy City Pulp and Paperback convention here in Chicago over the weekend — hands down one of my favorite shows, and absolutely the place where I make my best finds, year after year — and I stumbled across a paperback I’d never seen before.

Now, this really isn’t all that unusual. Last year I found Carl Jacobi’s Revelations in Black, The Bumper Book of Ghost Stories, Stephen E. Fabian’s luscious art book Ladies & Legends, and a bunch more things, just as examples. But I expect to be surprised by odd British books and small print run paperbacks from the 1970s. I don’t expect to discover that a major anthology from the 1990s — from one of the biggest paperback publishers in the country, and edited by no less a personage than Joe R. Lansdale — has completely slipped my radar.

Razored Saddles was originally released in a limited edition hardcover by Dark Harvest in September 1989, and nominated for a World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology. The hardcover is relatively easy to come by, and in fact I’ve seen plenty of them over the years. But the paperback must have come and gone in a flash, because I’ve never come across a copy in over 25 years.

The dealer who was offering it for sale was well aware of its scarcity — he wanted more than I would expect to pay for the limited edition hardcover. Well, I’m loathe to pay more than the cover price of a modern paperback for any vintage paperback, and I didn’t in this case. But I admit I was tempted… Razored Saddles looks like a stellar collection of weird western tales from a Who’s Who of early 90s horror writers, including Neal Barrett, Jr., Robert R. McCammon, David J. Schow, Lewis Shiner, Howard Waldrop, Richard Christian Matheson, F. Paul Wilson, Richard Laymon, and many others. And let’s face it. That cover, with a gun-toting skeletal cowboy mounted against a stark blue sky, very nearly seals the deal.

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Pretty Deadly: The Song of Death-Faced Ginny

Pretty Deadly: The Song of Death-Faced Ginny

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Pretty Deadly 1-smallI still remember the first time I read Sandman. I didn’t read comics back then: I thought of them as longer versions of the strips in the Sunday paper and didn’t give them much other thought. Then one day, I was sitting in the metal working classroom in High School, and Morley, a red-haired skinny punk rocker I still wish I had gotten to know better, handed me a comic book and said, “You should read this. It’s awesome.”

I knew from the cover, a strange collage that was both enticing and off-putting, it wouldn’t be what I expected. But I had no idea what I was in for. I didn’t like the art, and some of the references confused me, but otherwise, I was completely blown away. It was one of those life altering experiences: not only did I discover Neil Gaiman, I discovered comic books. That first volume completely changed the way I thought of storytelling and visual design, the way that myth and story could dance together, and the way the mythic and mundane could crash together.

Twenty years later, I had that experience again. Kelly Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios’ Pretty Deadly is a lush, gorgeous and lyrical graphic novel, a mythopoeic western that plays with the conventional gunslinger tropes while bringing in elements of horror and folklore. And what ties it all together is the song of Death-faced Ginny.

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Wolfmen in the Wild West: A Review of What Rough Beast by James A. Moore and Charles R. Rutledge

Wolfmen in the Wild West: A Review of What Rough Beast by James A. Moore and Charles R. Rutledge

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What Rough BeastWhat Rough Beast
James A. Moore and Charles R. Rutledge
Illustrations by Keith Minnion
White Noise Press
Signed and numbered hand-crafted Chapbook, 28 p., $17.00 ($15.00 plus $2.00 shipping)

Chapbooks have been around for a long time. For those who may be unfamiliar with them, they are short books usually consisting of a single story, although short collections are also common. They tend to focus on a particular work, or in the case of several stories, a particular writer.

The quality of chapbooks can vary. Before technology made it possible to produce professional level products, it was not uncommon to see chapbooks that were simply photocopies stapled together. These days, though, chapbooks can be works of art. Like the one we’re going to look at today. More on that in a bit.

Until recently, White Noise Press was not a publisher with which I was familiar. I was, however, familiar with the work of Moore and Rutledge, both collaboratively (here) as well as individually (here and here). These authors have a knowledge and love of the genre, and it shows in their work. Guys who are fans of Karl Edward Wagner and Manly Wade Wellman are all right in my book.

So when Charles contacted me not long ago inquiring if I would like a review copy of What Rough Beast, I thought about it for a while (1 while = 0.5 nanoseconds), then said yes.

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New Treasures: For a Few Souls More by Guy Adams

New Treasures: For a Few Souls More by Guy Adams

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For a Few Souls More-smallI’ve been waiting for the conclusion of Guy Adams’s Heaven’s Gate trilogy since the first installment, The Good The Bad and the Infernal, appeared in March 2013. The second volume, Once Upon a Time in Hell, was published almost exactly a year ago. It’s a gonzo Weird Western with demons, supernatural cowboys, and steampunk Indians.

In the third and final volume, For a Few Souls More, Heaven has fallen to Earth, joining the Union as the 43rd state… and the President sets out for the legendary town of Wormwood, the traveling community which appears once every hundred years for a single day.

The uprising in Heaven is at an end and Paradise has fallen, becoming the forty-third state of America. Now angels and demons must learn to get along with humans.

The rest of the world is in uproar. How can America claim the afterlife as its own? It’s certainly going to try as the President sets out for the town of Wormwood for talks with its governor, the man they call Lucifer.

Hell has problems of its own. There’s a new evangelist walking its roads, trying to bring the penitent to paradise, and a new power is rising. Can anyone stand up to the Godkiller?

For a Few Souls More was published on December 30, 2014 by Solaris. It is 316 pages, priced at $7.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The cover is by Jake Murray.

New Treasures: The Shotgun Arcana by R. S. Belcher

New Treasures: The Shotgun Arcana by R. S. Belcher

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The Shotgun Arcana-smallWe covered R.S. Belcher’s first Golgotha novel, The Six-Gun Tarot, in April, as part of my review of the current crop of Weird Westerns. Now Belcher returns to the bustling frontier town of Golgotha, Nevada, a place that hides more than its fair share of unnatural secrets, in The Shotgun Arcana.

Don’t know much about this R. S. Belcher fellow. He doesn’t have a website, and his only other publications are two short stories that appeared in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 9 and Deep Cuts.  A background check on the Black Gate supercomputer reveals that he runs Cosmic Castle, a comic book shop in Roanoke, Virginia, and that Tor.com interviewed him in October. That’s enough to make him alright in our book.

1870. A haven for the blessed and the damned, including a fallen angel, a mad scientist, a pirate queen, and a deputy who is kin to coyotes, Golgotha has come through many nightmarish trials, but now an army of thirty-two outlaws, lunatics, serial killers, and cannibals are converging on the town, drawn by a grisly relic that dates back to the Donner Party… and the dawn of humanity.

Sheriff Jon Highfather and his deputies already have their hands full dealing with train robbers, a mysterious series of brutal murders, and the usual outbreaks of weirdness. But with thirty-two of the most vicious killers on Earth riding into Golgotha in just a few day’s time, the town and its people will be tested as never before — and some of them will never be the same.

The Shotgun Arcana was published by Tor Books on October 7, 2014. It is 400 pages, priced at $25.99 in hardcover and $12.99 for the digital version. The deliciously creepy cover is by Raymond Swanland.

New Treasures: Haxan by Kenneth Mark Hoover

New Treasures: Haxan by Kenneth Mark Hoover

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Haxan-smallI’ve written a few times now about the terrific finds I made in the Dealers Room at the World Fantasy Convention. I know I’m probably starting to sound like a broken record, but when you have the opportunity to sample the very best new books from the most dynamic and exciting independent publishers in the industry, the need to share is pretty strong. So you’ll have to bear with me a bit until I get this out of my system.

I’ve already covered the treasures piled high on the Valancourt and Hippocampus Press tables, as well as Daryl Gregory’s We Are All Completely Fine and Lois H. Gresh’s anthology Dark Fusions – Where Monsters Lurk! But I haven’t even mentioned the Chizine table yet, and that’s a serious oversight. A catalog of the agonizing choices would take more time than I have tonight, so I’ll have to content myself with the first book I bought: Kenneth Mark Hoover’s weird western Haxan, the first in a new series.

Thermopylae. Masada. Agincourt. And now, Haxan, New Mexico Territory, circa 1874. Through a sea of time and dust, in places that might never be, or can’t become until something is set right, there are people destined to travel. Forever. Marshal John T. Marwood is one of these men. Taken from a place he called home, he is sent to fight an eternal war. It never ends, because the storm itself, this unending conflict, makes the world we know a reality. Along with all the other worlds waiting to be born. Or were born, but died like a guttering candle in eternal night… Haxan is the first in a series of novels. It’s Lonesome Dove meets The Punisher… real, gritty, violent, and blatantly uncompromising.

The sequel, Quaternity, will arrive March 31, 2015.

Haxan was published by Chizine Publications on July 1, 2014. It is 250 pages, priced at $16.99 in trade paperback and $9.99 for the digital edition.

Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear

Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear

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boothillAs my children will tell you, a frequent refrain around my house is “I’m so glad I was a kid in the 1970s.” I say it often enough that my teenage daughter – Lord, help her – is starting to wish she’d grown up during the “Me” Decade as well. I could probably write several posts about why I say this and why I say it with conviction, but I’ll spare my readers such blather at this time. However, I will explain how it’s pertinent to the present post.

Television during the 1970s was a funny thing. Outside of “prime time,” first-run programming was broadly limited to game shows, soap operas, news broadcasts, and, of course, Saturday morning cartoons. That left a lot of air time to be filled, which, coupled with new rules passed by the Federal Communications Commission intended to foster the creation of local content (but generally didn’t, at least in my neck of the woods), meant that I saw reruns of many, many old TV shows and almost as many old movies.

Even though I started watching most of this stuff because there was nothing else on, in retrospect, I’m glad that I did so. Not only did it expose me to content, genres, and actors with which I might otherwise have never become familiar, it also provided me with pop cultural connections to my parents, grandparents, and even just the older guys I’d later encounter in the hobby shops. That’s why, to this day, I’m very much a man out of time, with the tastes and interests of the generation before mine, such as my abiding interest in the Second World War. I suspect many of my age peers are similar in this respect.

One of those pop cultural connections to earlier generations was the Western, a genre that had peaked during the 1960s and was well on its way out the door by the time I was born. Yet, thanks to syndication, I got to see plenty of Westerns (as well as shows, like Gunsmoke and Bonanza, which were still being produced in my early childhood). It’s no surprise, then, that, once I discovered roleplaying games, I’d seek out any that recalled the Western TV shows and movies I’d enjoyed. The first – and, as it turned out, only – one I ever played was TSR’s Boot Hill, co-authored by Brian Blume and Gary Gygax.

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New Treasures: One Night in Sixes by Arianne ‘Tex’ Thompson

New Treasures: One Night in Sixes by Arianne ‘Tex’ Thompson

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One Night in Sixes-smallWe get a lot of review copies every month here at the Chicago rooftop headquarters of the Black Gate global publishing empire. You know what else we get? Press releases, pre-release galleys, PDFs, free Kindle books, stuff like that. We could never leave the office, and still keep you decently posted on the newest fantasy every month.

But we don’t aim for decent. We aim to keep you completely informed on the very best in the genre. And that means putting feet on the street, talking to folks in the industry, and visiting to bookstores. Lots and lots of bookstores. Like yesterday, where I found a copy of a fascinating “rural fantasy” from new writer Arianne ‘Tex’ Thompson. I would never have discovered her first novel if I hadn’t been wandering the aisles at B&N, and believe me, it deserves your attention.

The border town called Sixes is quiet in the heat of the day. Still, Appaloosa Elim has heard the stories about what wakes at sunset: gunslingers and shapeshifters and ancient animal gods whose human faces never outlast the daylight.

And the daylight is running out. Elim’s so-called ‘partner’ — that lily-white lordling Sil Halfwick –- has disappeared inside the old adobe walls, hell-bent on making a name for himself among Sixes’ notorious black-market traders. Elim, whose worldly station is written in the bastard browns and whites of his cow-spotted face, doesn’t dare show up home without him.

If he ever wants to go home again, he’d better find his missing partner fast. But if he’s caught out after dark, Elim risks succumbing to the old and sinister truth in his own flesh – and discovering just how far he’ll go to survive the night.

One word of warning: One Night in Sixes is the kind of novel that has a 10-page glossary and 11-page “People and Place” reference in the back. If that scares you, go back to reading E. Nesbit and the Ranger’s Apprentice books. Lightweight.

One Night in Sixes was published on July 29, 2014 by Solaris Books. It is 439 pages (plus all those glossaries and stuff), priced at $7.99 in paperback and $6.99 for the digital edition. The moody and effective cover is by Tomasz Jedruszek.

Traveling Gunslingers, Exorcists, and Zeppelins: A Review of Dead Man’s Hand

Traveling Gunslingers, Exorcists, and Zeppelins: A Review of Dead Man’s Hand

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Dead Man's Hand John Jospeh Adams-smallAs a kid, I remember my grandfather’s shelves lined with multiple copies of Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour westerns with titles like Wild Horse Mesa, Crossfire Trail, and Fair Blows the Wind.

I never actually read any (even today). Which is no knock against my grandfather’s tastes… my grandmother’s shelves were equally burdened with mysteries, primarily Agatha Christie, which I also never read (to date, I’ve only read one Agatha Christie novel).

But I actually adore a lot of movie westerns, especially classics with actors like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood. Though I admit that I mostly like the spaghetti (i.e. Italian or Italian influenced) side of the genre.

I also love SF&F, and it  has seen its share of experimental westerns crossovers. For example, we had the not-so-great 2011 Cowboys and Aliens, the perhaps even worse 1999 Wild Wild West, the fairly flat 1973 sci-fi Westworld, and the OK 1969 The Valley of Gwangi.

Fortunately there are have been some excellent exceptions as well, especially in the horror sub-genre, such as 1987’s Near Dark, the 1990 camp classic Tremors (though with less-successful sequels), 2008’s The Burrowers, and the outstanding 2011 zombie flick Exit Humanity.

But can the western genre mix well with SF&F in written word?

You bet it can! Though I’m sure there are forerunners to it, my first foray into such western cross-pollination is the latest anthology from John Joseph Adams called Dead Man’s Hand: An Anthology of the Weird West.

Besides being the editor of Lightspeed, Fantasy, and Nightmare magazines and co-hosting his own geeky podcast, Adams is also the editor of several acclaimed SF&F anthologies. The ones that I have read and enjoyed are his 2012 Epic: Legends of Fantasy and his very successful 2008 The Living Dead, but I’ve heard great things about his others as well.

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