I’ve been forming a little collection on my bookshelf.
It consists of collections of short stories & graphic novels that are Western in theme, but cross over into Fantasy, Science Fiction, Horror or other forms of Fantastic Fiction. There seems to be a certain body of work in this general area.
Examples in my collection include
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[li]Trails In Darkness by Robert E. Howard. Howard, of Conan the Barbarian fame, grew up in Cross Plains Texas, & there were many people still living there that helped make the West Wild. Short horror stories around a Western theme, including Cthuhlu Mythos items.[/li][li]Mad Amos by Alan Dean Foster. About a Mountain Man who deals in magic.[/li][li]War Of The Worlds: Global Dispatches. One short story deals with how a Texas town copes when confronted by the arrival of a Martian Cylinder & attendant Tripod invasion.[/li][li]Daisy Kutter: The Last Train by Kazu Kibuishi. Set in a futuristic New West, a female bandit, retired, is forced into one last train robbery. But all is not as it seems. Very good graphic novel, with an Old West feel to it.[/li][li]Weird Trails. Edited by Michael Szymanski. Fantasy, Dark Fantasy & Horror. A nice short story collection.[/li][li]Mutant Texas by Paul Dini. Fun graphic novel set in a bizzare corner of Texas.[/li][li]Wild West Show. Edited by Richard Claw. Graphic Novel. Collection of short items.[/li][li]Far West by Richard Moore. Graphic Novel, set in a West populated by Elves, Trolls, Dragons & Bear People. Two bounty hunters are the protagonists. Sexual themes. Overall, good art/stories.[/li][/ul]
I’m interested in more titles, graphic novels, short stories, novels, novellas, whatever.
I think anything by Joe Landsdale would qualify. He’s the master of Western-horror fiction, and he wrote the short story that inspired the Bruce Campbell movie Bubba Ho-Tep. He’s also written several Vertigo miniseries, including Weird Western Tales, and a few Jonah Hex miniseries dealing with horror elements.
In addition, I recommend the nine Preacher trade paperbacks, written by Garth Ennis and drawn by Steve Dillon. Preacher isn’t for everyone (certainly not the religious or the easily-offended), but it’s a wonderful Western-crime-horror-romance-comedy-buddy-action epic, and a love letter by an Irish comic book writer to the American Western films he loves so much.
Finally, for a musical recommendation, the band Ghoultown, who play “Gothabilly”: a blend of rockabilly, Johnny Cash-style country, twangy surf, and mariachi music, mostly dealing with fantastical or horror themes set in a mythical Old West.
Devil’s Tower and Devil’s Engine by Mark Sumner. Kind of alternate-reality western novels where magic and demons and gods all arose during the Civil War—Gettysburg IIRC—and remade the country in a very weird image.
Grim Praire Tales is a horror/western anthology movie starring James Earl Jones. Kind of Tales from the Darkside type stories.
I remember one story as being kind of freaky.
The story has a young man escorting a pregnant woman across the plains. One night she seduces him and while engaging in sex… Her vagina eats him. Her pregnant bulge is actually her digesting her last victim.
Alan Moore created “The Weird Rider” as a cowboy detective who deals with the paranormal for his ABC Tom Strong title. The Rider ultimately gets kinapped by, uh, giant alien collective of, uh, ants, who uh… are trying to terraform earth… to, uh, grow a crop of alien, uh, range critters.
From Dusk Til’ Dawn Taratino’s goofy Tex-Mex epic about bank robbers and their kidnapped hostages who run afoul of a saloon full of modern vampires in the sticks South of the border.
The Tremors movies all deal with the Graboids in and around Perfection, Nevada.
Crossover into horror? Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy, is one of, if not the, most horrifying books I’ve ever read. It’s wonderful, gripping, and beautiful in its atrocities, and the villain is chilling. I highly recommend it.
There’s a TV movie, Purgatory, that should suit you. It stars Eric Roberts as the leader of a gang of outlaws that stumbles into a town called Purgatory. The town seems to be holding a secret which is that all of the inhabitants committed crimes and were executed. They are then sent to Purgatory for a set number of years. If they renounce their crimes and behave themselves, they get to go to Heaven. If they transgress, they must go to Hell. Very interesting movie.
