Ride the trail to Devil’s Gulch, a Western town where strange things lie in the shadows. The Weird West was never weirder in this shared world anthology set in a town haunted by ghosts and worse. “If Music Be the Food of Love” by M. D. Jackson gets things rolling with a man seeking a lost macabre masterpiece. “Dark Raven” by T. Neil Thomas follows hanging Judge Galbraith to a haunted house where he will win (or lose?) a bet. “The Black Lake” by Jack Mackenzie has a quest for the location of this terrible body of water. “The Ghost Gun” by G. W. Thomas is a portfolio of tales featuring Deputy Sheriff Brett Hope as he fills the Ghost Gun with monster bullets, knowing that one day he will have to face Death himself. This collection of interconnected tales features illustrations and cover by M. D. Jackson.
BUY IT HERE in ebook and in paperback. Virtual Voice available.
If you want to check out the afterword to the book, then look no further than this blog:
AFTERWORD
The idea of doing a shared world anthology is unusual these days. I have no desire to publish anthologies with multiple authors anymore. The only way to do it justice is to do what good folks like Oliver Brackenbury or Jason M. Waltz do. You have to collect donations until you can pay the authors a reasonable amount of money. You end up spending all your time doing the Socials and not nearly enough time editing. (If I was even twenty years younger, maybe…) I’ll stick to writing, thanks.
But it’s too fun an idea to not run with it. So the RAGE m a ch i n e boys all wrote a long novella to satisfy the itch. I came up with the concept of Devil’s Gulch over a decade ago, with an old gold mining town (based largely on Barkerville in British Columbia, not Utah) with a number of creepy folks and built-in concepts to create any number of tales. I was even going to have my Weird West character, former deputy sheriff, Brett Hope appear.
What brought this back to me was something I noticed while cruising through some old issues of Texas Rangers and other Western Pulps. In the 1940s especially, the editors became fond of titles that used supernatural words to fancy up non-supernatural stories. (There are true Weird Westerns like the Lee Winters tales of Lon Williams, but I’m not talking about those.) For example, a man with a fast gun was called a “Heller”. (I used that one for a Brett Hope story already. ) “Ghost Gun” for a hidden weapon or a man hiding in ambush. But words like “Black”, “Devil”, “Hell”, “Wolf”, “Jinx”, “Ghost”, etc show up a lot. (These are pretty mild compared to the Shudder Pulp titles like “Black Pool For Hell Maidens” by Hal K. Wells)…
Read the whole thing here How To Write a Weird Western .
Mythos Horror & Ghostbreakers at RAGE m a c h i n e
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