Crossing Genres Part 1: Weird West Reading List

Starts with Billy the Kid free to roam America, having faked his own death. Free, that is, until Fineas Spoule, a.k.a. The Human Spider, discovers his secret. Now, afraid of being exposed, Billy finds himself in the service of a caravan of carnival sideshow performers who have unfinished business with a mad scientist none other than Victor Frankenstein himself!

This twisted lovechild of spaghetti westerns and Hammer horror flicks combines Powell’s humorous fast-paced storytelling and Hotz’s quirky macabre visuals for a story that the whole family will love… if they’re they the kind of family that loves alligator men and miniature boys fighting monstrous mistakes of science with the help of the fastest gunslinger in the West!

Montana, 1876. Othniel Charles marsh, one of the two top paleontologists in the world, is in the state’s Judith River fossil beds. Edward Drinker Cope, his biggest rival, is also in the area, and there simply aren’t enough bones for both of them. And time itself is against them: the fierce snows of winter are on the way and rumor has it, so is Sitting Bull, fresh from his triumph at little Big Horn.

Another complication: two foreign scientists are also competing for the bones. One says he’s from Sweden, the other says he’s from Iceland. One of them enlists Cope to help him, while the other befriends Marsh. The foreign scientists possess amazing technology, but that’s because they are much more foreign than they claimed. They don’t just want to take the bones out of the country–they’re fighting over who will get to take them clean off the planet…

Jack thinks of himself as a criminal mastermind with an unfortunate amount of bad luck. A schemer, a trickster …maybe even a thief? But, of course, he’s not out for himself he’s trying to take the burden off his hardworking mum’s shoulders. She’d understand, right? He hopes she might even be proud.

Then, one day, Jack chooses a target a little more …’giant’ than the usual, and as one little bean turns into a great big building-destroying beanstalk, his troubles really begin. But with help from Rapunzel and other eccentric friends, Jack just might out-swindle the evil giants and put his beloved city back in the hands of the people who live there …whilst catapulting them and the reader into another fantastical adventure.

The Arthurian legend as retold in the American Northwest, with all of its great symbolism, magic, and spirit of adventure! The legend begins with the Indian shaman, Whitefeather, when he discovers a tattooed six-gun imbued with supernatural power. This mystic has seen both the signs of the apocalypse and a vision of the one who can prevent it.

His search for the lawgiver is a quest that is not without mishap and death. Caliber, the mystically emblazoned gun, to be fired by only one man, will never miss. When aimed it brings down the heavens, firing lightning itself from its barrel. Arthur has returned to Telacoma, Oregon, looking to regain what is rightfully his. Has he come for justice or revenge? His future lies in the choice between the two.

In the Old West, settlers and Native Americans wage a bloody battle for control of the land. But when the Earth is threatened by conquerors from the stars, these sworn enemies must work together to save all humanity.

Daisy Kutter’s bandit days are behind her. She and partner Tom have gone legit, and now she is a respectable small-town citizen, owner of the local general store–and bored out of her mind. Frustration with the tedium of normal life and her own discontents gets her into trouble after she loses the store in a poker game. Mr. Winters, the security mogul who won it, offers a proposition she can’t refuse: to test the new security robots on his train. He is willing to pay. In a fit of recklessness, Daisy takes the job.

Dead in the West is the story of Mud Creek, Texas, a town overshadowed by a terrible evil. An Indian medicine man, unjustly lynched by the people of Mud Creek, has put a curse on the town. As the sun sets, he will have his revenge. For when darkness falls, the dead will walk in Mud Creek and they will be hungry for human flesh. The only one that can save the town is Reverend Jebediah Mercer, a gun toting preacher man who came to Mud Creek to escape his past. He has lost his faith in the Lord and his only solace is the whisky bottle. Will he renew his faith in himself and God to defeat this evil or will the town be destroyed?

Enter the Old West as interpreted by acclaimed horror author Nancy A. Collins. Dead Man’s Hand collects the novellas Walking Wol” and Lynch, the short stories “Calaverada” and “The Tortuga Hill Gang’s Last Ride”, and completes the five-card draw with the all-new vampire Western novella Hell Come Sundown. The West has never been better or weirder.

Over the course of its decade-plus lifespan, the Western/horror series Desperadoes has traveled some long, strange trails. Since its hard-riding heroes first met while tracking a ritualistic murderer whose crimes gave him supernatural powers, they’ve experienced quarantine in a haunted town, a reanimated dead boy with a thirst for revenge, a spiritualist’s nightmare, and a bizarre quest to the birthplace of the buffalo on behalf of Geronimo himself.

For the first time ever, the Desperadoes Omnibus brings all the published Desperadoes stories together in one place, teaming the series’ creator, award-winning, bestselling novelist Jeff Mariotte, with a veritable galaxy of superstar artists, new and established.

From automatons to zombies, many fantastic elements have been cross-pollinated with the western genre. This A-to-Z encyclopedia of the Weird Western covers film, TV, animation, dime novels, pulp fiction, comic books, novels, short stories and video and role-playing games.

With murder on their minds, vengeful Tycoons chase gunslinger Fiction Clemens from the wastelands to the big city. Caught in a recurring struggle between love and hate, Clemens finds himself in the middle of an alien conspiracy to drag his Old West world into the Space Age.

“If Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton had a love child, it would be the world of Fiction Clemens.” – Michael Oeming; Powers, Mice Templar

Deadlands anthology

‘The Trilogy with No Name’ – Twisted Tales of terror by all your favorite authors, including John “Night Train” Goff, John Hopler, and Shane Lacy Hensley scream side by side with tales by bestselling Star Wars™ author Michael Stackpole, with forewords by Joe R. Lansdale and Bruce “Evil Dead” Campbell! If you don’t have these anthologies, you’re wrong! But we’ll cut you some slack.

In the first book of this brilliant series, Stephen King introduces readers to one of his most enigmatic heroes, Roland of Gilead, The Last Gunslinger.

He is a haunting figure, a loner on a spellbinding journey into good and evil. In his desolate world, which frighteningly mirrors our own, Roland pursues The Man in Black, encounters an alluring woman named Alice, and begins a friendship with the Kid from Earth called Jake.

The Navajo called them the Anasazi: an enigmatic race of southwestern cliff dwellers. For centuries, the sudden disappearance of this proud and noble people has baffled historians. Summoned to a dark desert plateau by a desperate letter form an old friend, renowned investigator Mike Raglan is drawn into a world of mystery, violence, and explosive revelation. Crossing the border beyond the laws of man and nature, he will learn the astonishing legacy of the Anasazi — but not without a price.

Zombie towns – gunslinging exorcists – Aztec vampires – and lots more stuff your history teacher never told you about… ’cause she was scared! Includes nine original tales of the weird, wild west, by the likes of Barry Reese, Derrick Ferguson, Josh Reynolds, and more.

Preston Struck is an incompetent outlaw with a heart of fool’s gold. He discovers an army of metal men bent on destroying central California. While Struck avoids any form of heroism, he gets a little help from a magical old shaman and his sidekick Sasquatch. Struck is going to need all the help he can get because he’s deputized just as the mechanical men have taken over the railroad and are mutating the train into a giant demonic iron monster.

East Texan Joe Lansdale didn’t start out as a writer of comics, but he had always admired two DC characters, Jonah Hex and Batman, for their quality of being “dark knights.” Jonah Hex is no sleek crusader, though: He’s ugly, bizarre, and “just damn ornery.” This bound mini-series of five comic books is about a man of the old South in a splatter-western world–a world of weird horror and macabre humor. With wicked full-color art by Timothy Truman and Sam Glanzman.

Set in the Wild West. Felix Faust is imprisoned for a drunken disturbance in the town of Paradise’s jail and overwatched by Sheriff Oberon. Faust demands to be freed or Paradise will be destroyed. The next day, Sheriff Diana Prince leads two horse thieves to Paradise and finds the town destroyed. She heads to Diablo Wells to meet Kid Flash and Booster Gold, and begins assembling a posse.

A superhero western starring Wonder Woman and featuring…

• Kid Flash
• Hawkman
• Booster Gold
• Blue Beetle
• John Jones
• Kid Baltimore

Imagine classic Clint Eastwood westerns directed by Steven Spielberg, that’s the flavor of the Mad Amos stories–by one of SF most consistently popular authors. Is a renegade dragon harassing the men laying the rails of the great railroad? Are headless Indian spirits driving you from your land? Then the giant mountain man called Amos Malone is the man you need on your side. Original.

Narrator Buster Fogg’s family is wiped out by a twister in an early sequence described with surreal verve. Buster hitches on with Billy Bob Daniels, a patent-medicine pusher and trick shooter who claims to be the illegitimate son of Wild Bill Hickock, joining an entourage consisting of a kindly ex-slave named Albert, and Rot Toe, the wrestling ape.

Adventures on the road, which include swiping the mummified remains of Billy Bob’s “pa” and swindling settlers with their concoction of watered-down whiskey, stoke personal tensions that only aggravate troubles when their wagon rolls into Mud Creek and Billy Bob is called out by Texas Jack, a dime-novel desperado who, legend says, intimidated even Wild Bill.

Imagine classic Clint Eastwood westerns directed by Steven Spielberg, that’s the flavor of the Mad Amos stories–by one of SF most consistently popular authors. Is a renegade dragon harassing the men laying the rails of the great railroad? Are headless Indian spirits driving you from your land? Then the giant mountain man called Amos Malone is the man you need on your side. Original.

Ivan Isaacs was once a priest. Devoted to his faith he would have given up anything for it. Then the establishment he believed in turned on him, sending him headlong into Hell. Now, he’s back. With the priesthood now corrupt with demons, the undead and black prayers, he has returned with the help of the demon Belial, a voice in the darkness who offered Ivan a chance at vengeance, in exchange for his soul. With his six-shooter, a bowie knife at his side and the white collar of his former life adorning his neck he is a lost pale rider in a barren wild west where past and future collide.

Rapunzel is raised in a grand villa surrounded by towering walls. Rapunzel dreams of a different mother than Gothel, the woman she calls Mother. She climbs over the wall and finds out the truth. Her real mother, Kate, is a slave in Gothel’s gold mine. In this Old West retelling, Rapunzel uses her hair as a lasso and to take on outlaws–including Gothel.

Niko, the Steampunk Samurai, is in her Majesty?s service. But is he a faithful royal bodyguard, or a for-hire yojimbo? A perfect warrior, or a soulless weapon? Follow Niko on his journey of self-discovery with Uri Bronski and Cherokee Geisha, as the Three Yojimbo discover a world populated by silent samurai, fast talking geisha, deadly mechabetsushikime, digital djihits and morphing butterflies.

Whitechapel, November 1888: Jack the Ripper is committing his last known act of butchery in the one-room hovel occupied by the luckless harlot, Mary Kelly. And beneath the bed on which the fiend is cruelly and cheerfully eviscerating his victim cowers a fifteen-year-old boy….This is just the start of the extraordinary adventures of Trevor Bentley, a boy who embarked on an errand of mercy and ran into the most notorious serial killer in criminal history, a boy who became a man as he travelled on a quest of vengeance across a wild and untamed continent–a boy who brought the horrors of Jack the Ripper to the New World.

During the darkest days of the Civil War, wicked cutthroats came into possession of six pistols of otherworldly power. In time, the Sixth Gun?the most dangerous of the weapons?vanished. When the gun surfaces in the hands of an innocent girl, dark forces reawaken. Vile men thought long dead set their sights on retrieving the gun and killing the girl. Only Drake Sinclair, a gunfighter with a shadowy past, stands in their way.

As night manager of Santa Cruz?s quirkiest coffeehouse, Marzi McCarty makes a mean espresso, but her first love is making comics. Her claim to fame: The Strange Adventures of Rangergirl, a cowpunk neo-western yarn. Striding through an urban frontier peopled by Marzi?s wild imagination, Rangergirl doles out her own brand of justice. But lately Marzi?s imagination seems to be altering her own reality. She?s seeing the world through Rangergirl?s eyes?literally–complete with her deadly nemesis, the Outlaw.

It all started when Marzi opened a hidden door in the coffeehouse storage room. There, imprisoned among the supplies, she saw the face of something unknown?and dangerous. And she unwittingly became its guard. But some primal darkness must?ve escaped, because Marzi hasn?t been the same since. And neither have her customers, who are acting downright apocalyptic.

In the wilderness of the Strangeways, black hats and badmen are the least of your worries. Here, there’s fates worse than death and you just might find that your trusty revolver isn’t enough to get you out of trouble.

1868. Ex-Army officer Seth Collins is trying to forget the horrors of the Civil War when he finds himself faced with another kind of horror altogether. Something, not someone, is hunting the people of Silver Branch, including Collins’ estranged sister. A strange and seemingly unkillable wolf prowls the wilderness, killing not simply for pleasure but to utterly destroy Silver Branch. But this is a town with its own secrets, ones that it won’t give up willingly.

Wyatt Earp. Doc Holliday. Ike Clanton. You think you know the story. You don?t.

Jesse Fox left his Eastern college education to travel West, where he?s made some decidedly odd friends, like the physician Chow Lung, who insists that Jesse has a talent for magic. In Tombstone, Jesse meets the tubercular Doc Holliday, whose inner magic is as suppressed as his own, but whose power is enough to attract the sorcerous attention of Wyatt Earp.

Events are building toward the shootout of which you may have heard. But you haven’t heard the whole, secret story until you’ve read Emma Bull’s unique take on an American legend, in which absolutely nothing is as it seems…

Eff was born a thirteenth child. Her twin brother, Lan, is the seventh son of a seventh son. This means he’s supposed to possess amazing talent — and she’s supposed to bring only bad things to her family and her town. Undeterred, her family moves to the frontier, where her father will be a professor of magic at a school perilously close to the magical divide that separates settlers from the beasts of the wild.

With wit and wonder, Patricia Wrede creates an alternate history of westward expansion that will delight fans of both J. K. Rowling and Laura Ingalls Wilder.

Somehow the past has placed a sixty billion double dollar bounty on Vash?s head, and the gun slinging pacifist can?t seem to get away from money grabbing, itchy-trigger-finger citizenry. Find out why Vash is worth so much dead!

Collins’ latest novella is a variation on the western werewolf premise and an extension of themes she has been developing since her debut.

Narrator Billy Skillet is the 150-year-old shapeshifter offspring of a human mother and vargr (werewolf) father. The first half of Billy’s tale is a picaresque romp in which the competing demands of his human and feral sides drive him from the west-Texas Comanches among whom he’s raised in the mid-19th century into the white man’s world, where he works as a saloon attendant, a drummer for a traveling medicine show and a sidekick for a vampire gunslinger.

100 years after the Big Wet, Earth has been left a broken, infertile world of rock and sand. The town of Providens is like many others on the post-Big Wet planet-small, mostly illiterate, and struggling for survival. When the town welcomes a stranger named Michael into its midst, will the quiet man lead them to a brave new world or shatter what little order still exists

The Harvey-nominated, critically acclaimed ongoing series gets the deluxe hardcover treatment with this new massive collection! Reprinting the first 13 issues of Wasteland, including the fan-favorite “Walking the Dust” prose shorts, this impressive tome chronicles the opening adventures of Michael, a mysterious wanderer struggling to find the answers to both his past and his future.

A facsimile reprint of the April 1933 issue of ‘Weird Trails’ magazine, featuring M.M. Moamrath’s ‘Riders of the Purple Ooze,’ and many more.

A monster is coming after Shane Reece… An earthquake two hundred miles from Fairfield has unleashed something terrible – Clayton T. Motley, a zombie gunslinger looking for revenge.

Back in the middle 1800s, one of Shane’s ancestors ran Motley out of Fairfield by putting a bullet in his hide. A posse chased the fleeing bandit for weeks until Motley holed up in a cave, where he eventually succumbed to his gunshot wound. The bullet inside him, however, was made out of something . . . strange. Now, almost one hundred and fifty years later, the earthquake has freed the undead gunfighter from his rocky prison – and he wants revenge. He’s coming after the only Reece left in Fairfield – Shane.

Haakon rides off an 1970s Minnesota farm and into a lifetime of weird and wonderful adventures in this ? the first complete collection of stories concerning a real, one-of-a-kind hero. Over the course of forty years, Haakon faces every weird menace from the walking dead of the Caribbean to the Big Foot of the Northwest.

Here are 36 “stories of science fiction, fantasy & horror” written by author Aaron B. Larson. These tales were originally printed in Classic Pulp Fiction Stories, Double Danger Tales, Of Unicorns and Space Stations, and Trails. Larson dedicates his first collection to the memory of Robert E. Howard. Enjoy the adventures of adventurer Haakon Jones set in times past throughout the Continental United States. Trade paperback, drawing on cover.

Whenever innocent blood is spilled upon the sand of the American west, a foul wind blows in across the frontier! Fear not! For that foul stench belongs to ZEKE DEADWOOD: ZOMBIE LAWMAN.

A classic western tale of Saturday matinee action with a healthy dose of B-movie horror. ZEKE DEADWOOD tells the story of a lone zombie out to clean up a small western town from a villainous band of outlaws. Can Zeke stop their drunken rampage of terror? Will the townsfolk even let themselves be saved by the undead?