Of Honey and Wildfires


Sarah Chorn - 2020
    Now, everything revolves around that magical oil. What began as a simple scouting expedition becomes a life-changing ordeal for Arlen Esco. The son of a powerful mogul, Arlen is kidnapped and forced to confront uncomfortable truths his father has kept hidden. In his hands lies a decision that will determine the fate of everyone he loves—and impact the lives of every person in Shine Territory. The daughter of an infamous saboteur and outlaw, Cassandra has her own dangerous secrets to protect. When the lives of those she loves are threatened, she realizes that she is uniquely placed to change the balance of power in Shine Territory once and for all. Secrets breed more secrets. Somehow, Arlen and Cassandra must find their own truths in the middle of a garden of lies.

Wolf in Shadow


David Gemmell - 1987
    And through this world walks Jon Shannow, the Jerusalem Man. His quest is to find lost Jerusalem--and confront the world's evil, including the devil himself.

Vermilion: The Adventures of Lou Merriwether, Psychopomp


Molly Tanzer - 2015
    It’s an important job, though most folks consider it downright spooky. Some have even accused Lou of being more comfortable with the dead than the living, and, well… they’re not wrong.When Lou hears that a bunch of Chinatown boys have gone missing somewhere deep in the Colorado Rockies she decides to saddle up and head into the wilderness to investigate. Lou fears her particular talents make her better suited to help placate their spirits than ensure they get home alive, but it’s the right thing to do, and she’s the only one willing to do it.On the road to a mysterious sanatorium known as Fountain of Youth, Lou will encounter bears, desperate men, a very undead villain, and even stranger challenges. Lou will need every one of her talents and a whole lot of luck to make it home alive…From British Fantasy Award nominee Molly Tanzer comes debut novel Vermilion, a spirited weird Western adventure that puts the punk back into steampunk.

Clementine


Cherie Priest - 2010
    Exiled, widowed, and on the brink of poverty…she reluctantly goes to work for the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in Chicago.Adding insult to injury, her first big assignment is commissioned by the Union Army. In short, a federally sponsored transport dirigible is being violently pursued across the Rockies and Uncle Sam isn’t pleased. The Clementine is carrying a top secret load of military essentials—essentials which must be delivered to Louisville, Kentucky, without delay.Intelligence suggests that the unrelenting pursuer is a runaway slave who’s been wanted by authorities on both sides of the Mason-Dixon for fifteen years. In that time, Captain Croggon Beauregard Hainey has felonied his way back and forth across the continent, leaving a trail of broken banks, stolen war machines, and illegally distributed weaponry from sea to shining sea.And now it’s Maria’s job to go get him.He’s dangerous quarry and she’s a dangerous woman, but when forces conspire against them both, they take a chance and form an alliance. She joins his crew, and he uses her connections. She follows his orders. He takes her advice.And somebody, somewhere, is going to rue the day he crossed either one of them.

The Navajo Nightmare


David Sodergren - 2021
    Or at least, he was, once. Now he lives a quiet life with his family, until a gang of crooks take everything from him and Charles must make a diabolical pact. His soul, in exchange for vengeance!Tanner Williams has been tasked with an impossible job — to track and kill the bloodthirsty abomination that stalks the plains. Haunted by his dark past, Tanner must learn the horrifying secret of…THE NAVAJO NIGHTMARE!From the twisted minds of David Sodergren (The Forgotten Island) and Steve Stred (Ritual) comes a gripping, blood-soaked horror western that will leave you breathless.

Walk The Darkness Down


John Boden - 2019
    Older than darkness.Levi is a monstrous man—made of scars and scary as hell, he’s glutted on ghosts and evolving to carry out the dark wishes of the ancient whispers in his head. He’s building a door and what’s on the other side is terrifying.Jones spent a lot of time living bottle to bottle and trying to erase things. Now he’s looking for the man who killed his mother and maybe a little bit of looking or himself as well.Keaton is on the run from accusations as well as himself, he suffers alone until he meets Jubal, an orphaned boy with his little sisters in a sling.Every line is not a straight line and everything must converge. A parable writ in dust and blood on warped barn wood. A journey in the classic sense, populated with dried husks of towns… and people both odd and anything but ordinary. Hornets, reverse-werewolves and one of the most vicious villains you’ll ever know are all part of it.Pull on your boots and saddle up, we’ll Walk The Darkness Down.

Dark Alchemy


Laura Bickle - 2015
    What she finds instead is Temperance, a dying Western town with a gold rush past and a meth-infested present. But under the town's dust and quiet, an old power is shifting. When bodies start turning up - desiccated and twisted skeletons that Petra can't scientifically explain - her investigations land her in the middle of a covert war between the town's most powerful interests. Petra's father wasn't the only one searching for the alchemical secrets of Temperance, and those still looking are now ready to kill. Armed with nothing but shaky alliances, a pair of antique guns, and a relic she doesn't understand, the only thing Petra knows for sure is that she and her coyote sidekick are going to have to move fast, or die next.

Hallowed Ground


Steven Savile - 2011
    "She died, rose, and nearly died again. She comes. The crows know her – the crows guide her. She follows the sound of a crying child. She follows the drag of un-kept promises on her heart." – Chessie – Hallowed Ground"They came in the night with their creak-wheeled wagons and patchwork tents, rolling down through the gulch and up the other side to pitch camp. In Rookwood, they called it 'Dead man's Gulch,' and in Rookwood, names were important. If you walked too far through that God-forsaken, dust-drowned ditch, you were bound to drag your boots through bones. If you felt something sharp dig into your heel, it could be a tooth taking a last bite of something hot and living. The Deacon stood in silent shadows watching their progress, occasionally glancing up into the pale, inadequate light of the waning moon."When a man known only as The Deacon set up camp outside Rookwood, a murder of crows took to unnatural, moonlit flight. The crows came to Rookwood; trouble soon to follow. Things were already strange in that God-forsaken town, but no one could have predicted the forces and fates about to meet in a dust-bowl clearing in the desert. A Preacher. A Demon. An Angel. A Gunslinger.A bargain with the darkness was signed in blood, and broken, and as such deals usually do, it went south. Now the fate of lost lovers, faith healers, ancient Gods and the Devil himself collide in a circle of wagons tended by the damaged and deformed, the saved and the shorn. There's a power come to Rookwood, and this one-horse town is about to be transformed. Such deals are only made and broken…on Hallowed Ground.From Steven Savile, International bestselling author of Silver, The Last Angel, and The Sufferer's Song, and David Niall Wilson, Bram Stoker Award-winner David Niall Wilson, author of Deep Blue, This is My Blood, & Heart of a Dragon, comes a tale of the old west, magic, enlightenment and damnation readers have said is like Stephen King's The Gunslinger meets Daniel Knauf's Carnivale.

Lawless Lands: Tales from the Weird Frontier


Emily Lavin LeverettBarb Hendee - 2017
     The whistle of the eastbound train. The heat of the desert sun. The western is the quintessential American literary genre, and now we're turning it on its head. From sentient tumbleweeds to time-traveling schoolmarms, desert demons to werejaguars, space-faring herd drivers to gunslinger justice, there's something for everyone. Featuring many of the best writers in speculative fiction today, saddle up for the thrills – we're going to take you on a wild ride through a West that never was. Lawless Lands includes 20 mind-bending weird western stories including - Desert Gods by Aubrey Campbell Railroad by Matthew J. Hockey Pixie Season by Seanan McGuire The Men with No Faces by Alexandra Christian Lost Words by David B. Coe Boots of Clay by Laura Anne Gilman Trickster's Choice by Jo Gerrard Wolves Howling in the Night by Faith Hunter To Hear a Howling a Howling Herd by Gunnar De Winter Calliope Stark:Bone Tree Bounty Hunter by Edmund R. Schubert Cards and Steel Hearts by Pamela Jeffs Bloodsilver by A. E. Decker Volunteered by B. S. Donovan The Stranger in the Glass by Dave Beynon Belly Speaker by Nicole Givens Kurtz Walk the Dinosaur by John G. Hartness The Time Traveling Schoolmarms of Marlborough County by Barb Hendee Rainmaker by Margaret S. McGraw Out of Luck by Jeffrel Hall Rollin' Death by Jake Bible Featuring twenty original western short stories from new worlds and the familiar worlds of Faith Hunter's Jane Yellowrock novels, Laura Anne Gilman's The Devil's West series, and John G. Hartness' Bubba the Monster Hunter series, Lawless Lands is a weird western anthology with something for everyone.

One Night in Sixes


Arianne "Tex" Thompson - 2014
    Still, Appaloosa Elim has heard the stories about what wakes at sunset: gunslingers and shapeshifters and ancient earthly gods whose human faces never outlast the daylight.If he ever wants to go home again, he’d better find his missing partner before they do. But if he’s caught out after dark, Elim risks succumbing to the old and sinister truth that lives in his own flesh – and discovering just how far he’ll go to survive the night.

Silver on the Road


Laura Anne Gilman - 2015
    But this is not the devil you know. This is a being who deals fairly with immense—but not unlimited—power, who offers opportunities to people who want to make a deal, and makes sure they always get what they deserve. But his land is a wild west that needs a human touch, and that’s where Izzy comes in. Inadvertently trained by him to see the clues in and manipulations of human desire, Izzy is raised to be his left hand and travel the circuitous road through the territory. As we all know, where there is magic there is power and chaos…and death.

Six-Gun Snow White


Catherynne M. Valente - 2013
    Picture instead a masterfully evoked Old West where you are more likely to find coyotes as the seven dwarves. Insert into this scene a plain-spoken, appealing narrator who relates the history of our heroine’s parents—a Nevada silver baron who forced the Crow people to give up one of their most beautiful daughters, Gun That Sings, in marriage to him. Although her mother’s life ended as hers began, so begins a remarkable tale: equal parts heartbreak and strength. This girl has been born into a world with no place for a half-native, half-white child. After being hidden for years, a very wicked stepmother finally gifts her with the name Snow White, referring to the pale skin she will never have. Filled with fascinating glimpses through the fabled looking glass and a close-up look at hard living in the gritty gun-slinging West, this is an utterly enchanting story…at once familiar and entirely new.

The Flash Gold Boxed Set, Chronicles I-III


Lindsay Buroker - 2014
    But the secret her alchemist father left her with, a magical energy source called flash gold, has put her in danger. Everyone from con artists to gangsters is hunting her down. She’s used to taking care of herself and is about as trusting as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs, but when enemies threaten to overpower her, she may have no choice but to join forces with the mysterious man.Set in the Yukon’s gold-rush era, The Flash Gold Boxed Set contains three adventures of action, magic, and romance:Flash GoldHuntedPeacemaker

Thirteenth Child


Patricia C. Wrede - 2009
    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.

The Devil's Pay


Dave Gross - 2013
    Sam and the Devil Dogs may be relaxing in Tarna, but it’s not by choice—they’d rather be employed than resting up. When a dangerous job offer comes from “the old man,” Sam takes the Devil Dogs and their newest recruit, Dawson, on a perilous hunt to capture an unidentified warjack before their rival Steelheads or the horrific Cryx make a claim on the never-before-seen technology.Whether their mission will be worth the risk remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: Sam and the Devil Dogs will do whatever it takes to bring home The Devil’s Pay.