The Good, the Bad, & the Uncanny

October 16, 2023
Bestseller Maberry (Kagen the Damned) brings together 16 unsettling and often brutal tales exploring the darkest, weirdest aspects of the Old West. While some stories focus on man’s own inhumanity and cruelty, many also bring in supernatural elements—including vampires, werewolves, and creatures from Indigenous folklore—to provide a healthy dose of external conflict and bloody violence. Standouts include Keith R.A. DeCandido’s “The Legend of Long-Ears,” which reimagines Calamity Jane as having a Cassandraesque gift for prophecy; Greg Cox’s “Bigfoot Gorge,” about a mining expedition gone horribly wrong; and Aaron Rosenberg’s “The Stacked Deck,” in which a gambler enters the card tournament of his life. Laura Anne Gilman spins a fable-like yarn of settlers coming to a new land in “In the End, the Beginning,” and Jennifer Brody’s “The Night Caravan,” the only science fiction piece in the bunch, hits all the right notes as two sisters try to survive an inhospitable desert. This strong array of chilling frontier tales feels like perfect campfire story fodder.

November 1, 2023

The Weird West of this collection is a place where the legends of the Wild West meet the uncanny denizens of horror in settings that range from the magical lands of faerie to the days of the First World when Coyote and Changing Woman walked the Earth. The story in this collection that best exemplifies this Weird West is "The Legend of Long-Ears" by Keith R.A. DeCandido, with its blend of two larger-than-life legends of the Old West--Calamity Jane and Marshal Bass Reeves, as told by an ancient spirit of justice. Two stories with a similar theme, "Desert Justice" by Maurice Broaddus and "In the End, the Beginning" by Laura Anne Gilman, present alternative possibilities for the story of "how the West was won" and who it was, or could have been, won by. "Bigfoot Gorge" by Greg Cox is the standout of several stories in the collection that trip over the line into horror. VERDICT Recommended for readers of Charlaine Harris's "Gunnie Rose" series and Gilman's "Huntsmen" series and those who appreciated Wild, Wild West, as the stories in this collection take that wild and run with it.--Marlene Harris

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