I wrote the original version of this piece for
Katy O'Dowd's blog, about a year or so ago. Here's an edited, expanded version.
You know who Robert
E. Howard is, right? That crazy Texan who wrote the Conan stories, back in the
‘20’s and early ‘30’s? Yeah, of course you do. What the hell kind of
fantasy/speculative fiction fan would you be if you didn’t know that? A damn
poor one, that’s what kind. I really love REH. Always have. But you know, he
wrote a LOT more than just Conan stories. In about a 10 year span (before he
put a bullet in his own head) he wrote about 800 stories, for a wide variety of
genre magazines of the time. Heroic fantasy like Conan or Solomon Kane,
historical adventure, humor, boxing stories, horror… and westerns. REH’s
westerns were phenomenal. Some of his best work. And they generally fall into
three different catagories: comic westerns (like the crazy tall tales of
Breckinridge Elkins) straight westerns (like the grimly unforgettable Vultures
of Whapeton) and the occasional Weird Western, like Horror from the
Mound. Ah, Horror from the Mound… what a story.
It’s set in the
American Southwest that REH knew so well, but it’s infused with such an
unsettling mood, shot through with raw fear and strangeness and the
supernatural. With that story, REH more or less invented the weird western. Not
that it was called ‘weird western’ at the time. When some new genetic variation
on genre first appears, it doesn’t usually have a name. That happens years,
sometimes decades later. To the reading public, Horror from the Mound was
simply a highly effective horror story that happened to take place in the
American West. But it was a weird western, make no mistake, and probably the
very first one.
I’m using the term
‘weird western’ in a very specific sense here, mind you. Technically, any story
that takes place in the Old West of mythology but also includes an element of
terror, oddness, sci-fi, or speculative fiction could be called a weird
western. Using a broader definition, you could call Ambrose Bierce’s Occurrence
at Owl Creek Bridge a weird western. And why not? It’s a decidedly strange
story. But for my purposes, a weird western is a western with not just an odd
element, but specifically a horror element. That leaves out Bierce. It also leaves
out the Western sci-fi serial starring Gene Autrey called The
Phantom Empire (although just barely). …and leaves us with… not much.
In fact, I’m
hard-pressed to think of many weird westerns after that, until Joe R. Lansdale
wrote Dead in the West, a terrific novella about an itinerant gun-slinging
preacher who faces down a horde of zombies in a small Western town, and more or
less re-invented the weird western. Dead in the West will be available again
soon in an edition called Deadman’s Road, packaged with its follow-up story, so
keep an eye open for it.
Lansdale kept the
weird western alive after that with his take on the DC Comics character Jonah
Hex. Hex had been around since the early ‘70’s, making his first appearance in
a comic called All-Star Western. All-Star became — aptly enough — Weird
Western, although to be honest there wasn’t much weird about the stories.
Lansdale changed that when he wrote the Jonah Hex mini-series Two-Gun Mojo,
which found scarred bounty hunter Hex facing down a maniacal medicine man, a
sinister freak show, and the reanimated corpse of Wild Bill Hickok. It was
funny, scary, profane, and pure genius.
He followed that
mini-series with two more about Hex: Riders of the Worm and Such (which paid
homage, sort of, to the Phantom Empire serial mentioned earlier) and Shadows
West. A little later, Lansdale would give the same horror treatment to a Lone
Ranger story for Topps Comics.
Lansdale opened the
floodgates, and in the years since the weird western has existed as a
not-so-commercially viable genre. These days, right or wrong, it’s more often
considered a sub-genre of the steampunk movement.
Some other Weird
Westerns in recent years:
Mad Amos, by Alan
Dean Foster
A Book of Tongues,
by Gemma Files
Territory, by Emma
Bull
Those Who Went
Remain There Still, by Cherie Priest
Dead Man’s Hand, by
Nancy Collins
The Buntline
Special, by Mike Resnick
The Devil Draws Two,
by David B. Riley
A Pack of Wolves, by
Eric S. Brown
Buffalo Bill in the
Gallery of Machines, by Mark Rapacz
I haven’t read all
of these, so I can’t attest to the quality, but it’s good to know, at least,
that the genre is thriving in its own small way.
There are lots of anthologies,
as well, like:
Razored Saddles
Skull Full of Spurs
Fist Full of Dead
Guys
How the West was
Weird
A Fistful of Horrors
On the big screen,
most commercially successful or higher profile stabs at weird western tend to
be of the broader definition, anyway. Wild Wild West, for instance. Or Cowboys
and Aliens. The majority of horror-oriented Weird Westerns are direct-to-video
type fare, like Grim Prairie Stories, The Quick and the Undead, Gallowwalker,
Stage Ghost, and the monumentally awful BloodRayne 2. But once in a while, a
really good horror-western will pop up, like the criminally under-rated The
Burrowers.
My own series of
short weird western tales featuring the mysterious gun-slinger Hawthorne is
doing much better than I ever would have expected on Amazon and Smashwords. If
you’ve never read a weird western before, would I be out of line in suggesting
that the Hawthorne stories might be a good place to start? After that, I highly
recommend REH. You can find his weird western tales in the collection The Black
Stranger, along with many of his other great tales of horror, and his western
collection, End of the Trail.
