Once Upon A Time In The Weird West

If you like your westerns with a splash of magic, a touch of steampunk, and plenty of passionate romance between men, hold on to your hat! The West is about to get weird.

THE CONCLUSION OF THE ACCLAIMED WEIRD WESTERN SERIES.The Hour Of Incursion is here. The Great Old Ones are stirring in their ancient slumber. It is high noon for the entire universe.Seeking to rouse the Old Ones, Adon has gathered together the Creed - an army of fallen Hasidic mystics - and a host of dark allies including skinwalkers, necromancers, an undead master gunslinger, Lilith the Queen of Demons, and the Angel of Death himself.The Rider and Kabede, in a last bid to stop Adon, recruit their own band, including an unstoppable preacher more steam engine than man, an alien entity from the dawn of time, a young witch, and the enigmatic Faustus Montague, an angelic being from another universe.But Lucifer the master of hell watches from his capitol city, ready to commit his legions to the winning side.And he has an agent among the Rider's companions....

A WEIRD WESTERN, A GUN-TOTING, CIGARILLO-CHEWING FANTASY BUILT FROM HANGMAN’S ROPE AND SPENT BULLETS. Wormwood has appeared, and with it a doorway to the afterlife. But what use is a door if you can’t step through it? Hundreds have battled unimaginable odds to reach this place, including the blind shooter Henry Jones; the drunk and liar Roderick Quartershaft; that most holy, yet enigmatic of orders, the Brotherhood of Ruth; the inventor Lord Forset and his daughter Elisabeth; the fragile messiah Soldier Joe and his nurse Hope Lane. Of them all, Elwyn Wallace, a young man who only wanted to travel west for a job, would have happily forgone the experience. But he finds himself abroad in Hell, a nameless, aged gunslinger by his side. He had thought nothing could match the terror of his journey thus far, but time will prove him wrong. On the road to Hell, good intentions don’t mean a damn.

From automatons to zombies, many elements of fantasy and science fiction have been cross-pollinated with the Western movie genre. In its second edition, this encyclopedia of the Weird Western includes many new entries covering film, television, animation, novels, pulp fiction, short stories, comic books, graphic novels and video and role-playing games. Categories include Weird, Weird Menace, Science Fiction, Space, Steampunk and Romance Westerns.

Frontiers have always attracted the Other - where they find that the Other is always already there. These 22 stories explore what happens when queer characters encounter weirdness on the edge of the worlds they know. Authors include: Julie Bozza, J.A. Bryson, Dannye Chase, S.E. Denton, Miguel Flores, Adele Gardner, Roy Gray, KC Grifant, Peter Hackney, Bryn Hammond, Narrelle M Harris, Justin Warren Jackson, Toshiya Kamei, Catherine Lundoff, Bunny McFadden, Angus McIntyre, Atlin Merrick, Eleanor Musgrove, Jennifer Lee Rossman, Lauren Scharhag, Sara L. Uckelman, and Dawn Vogel.

The Rider and friend Kabede form a band, including a preacher, witch and angelic being, to stop Adon, who has gathered an army of failed mystics of his own. Meanwhile, Lucifer watches from Hell to join the winners.

HOW THE WEST WAS WEIRD! From a kill-or-be-killed gunfight with a vampire to an encounter in a steampunk bordello, the weird western is a dark, gritty tale where the protagonist might be playing poker with a sorcerous deck of cards, or facing an alien on the streets of a dusty frontier town. Here are twenty-three original tales—stories of the Old West infused with elements of the fantastic—produced specifically for this volume by many of today’s finest writers. Included are Orson Scott Card’s first “Alvin Maker” story in a decade, and an original adventure by Fred Van Lente, writer of Cowboys & Aliens. Other contributors include: Tobias S. Buckell * David Farland * Alan Dean Foster * Jeffrey Ford * Laura Anne Gilman * Rajan Khanna * Mike Resnick * Beth Revis * Fred Van Lente * Walter Jon Williams * Ben H. Winters * Christie Yant * Charles Yu *

1886. Geronimo and his followers, the last Apache resistance to white encroachment, have been transported east, and the blue wool defenders of The Fort settle into boredom, directing their cruel attentions to illicit liquor and prostitutes, their clearest enemy a weak officer’s bullheaded wife on a moral crusade. One broken and battered Chiricahua boy, Na-e-te-nay, drags himself across the Arizona desert, held together only by a bleak vision of revenge; a vision that will cause him to abandon his warrior traditions and set his feet on Coyote’s Trail — the road of murder and evil. After a brothel shootout between Na-e-te-nay and the US cavalry ends in fire and death, America, a broken young Mexican woman with her own reasons for hating the cavalry, finds herself pulled into his plot. Enlisting the nominal aid of Rogerio, a shiftless, sadistic whiskey peddler who knows more about America’s hellish past than even she does, the three conspire to draw Na-e-te-nay’s remaining enemies out of the safety of The Fort, using America’s body as bait. But America has her own vision of revenge… "With COYOTE'S TRAIL, Ed Erdelac has created a story as raw as the wound from a bullwhip. His blistering prose, combined with superb use of time, place, and character, gives COYOTE'S TRAIL the kind of life that springs off the page and into the reader's consciousness. That's a rare thing these days, and in the world of genre fiction, rarer still. This is a damn hard story about damn hard men, and told damn well." --C. Courtney Joyner, Author of SHOTGUN