A Woman is a Mule: Victor LaValle’s Lone Women

Adelaide Henry is on the run from her past. Her parents are dead, and not by natural causes. She has burned the bodies and taken a steamer trunk containing her legacy—a family curse, actually—and made her way from the California homesteads where she and her parents worked the earth to a new start on a […]

Dude, Synthetic Blood Sucks: Sundown (1989)

In the gorgeous wastes of John Ford country, amongst the mesas and buttes not far from Moab, Utah, there’s a little speck on some old maps called Purgatory. You don’t see the town on new maps, alas. Once it was a copper town, but when that boom faded, it dried up under the relentless sunshine. […]

He’s From Where You’re Going … Hell: Devil Rider

By the time the posse catches up with the Devil Rider (Tag Groat), he’s already killed at least six people. He has no reason for what he’s doing, and he begs for no mercy from any God. He’s doing the devil’s work, and business is a’booming. The posse hangs him, but that doesn’t work. They […]

Six Guns and the Supernatural: Hot Snake

John Jenkins (Carlos East) is roaming the wilderness around the small town of Hot Snake. He just hit an Army payroll and funeral carriage, killing the soldiers as well as murdering and raping the widow. The price on his head is $5000, and two men are looking to claim it. Emiliano (Eric del Castillo) is […]

Dead By Dawn: Bryan Smith’s The Last of the Ravagers

The town of Snakebite, Arizona is about to face an unprecedented night of terror and dark magic. A fiend called Doyle has set his sights on the town, and his army of blue-skinned creatures are on the move, closing the town off. Bounty hunter Russ Harper is the first to encounter them and escape with […]

Feeling a Mite Peckish: The Dead and the Devoured

Eleven-year-old Billy Coburn and his family were just one of three families heading west in a wagon train. The town of Harvest Home is experiencing a gold rush and seemed a good place to start anew, so his folks banded together with the Shumakers and the McCrays, got themselves a pair of native guides (Ahote […]

Our Stories Live On After Us: Maurice Broaddus’ Buffalo Soldier

Maurice Broaddus has been achieving some good notes with his latest book, the Afrofuturist space opera novel Sweep of Stars. We’re not looking at that particular work just now. Nor are we looking at the ambitious trilogy of novels that put him on the sf/f map, the Breton Court trilogy that mashes up the Arthurian […]

A Devil Comes to Duncan: M. Ennenbach’s Hunger on the Chisholm Trail

Last year, we took a gander at some of the Splatter Western books from Death’s Head Press as a part of our lengthy look into weird westerns. This year, we will take a gander at a few more of those works for our SPLATTERday Reads series. Although they appear as entries in a series, the […]

Innocence and Experience: Kristopher Triana’s Ballad of the Werevixens

After the horrific events devastated the town of Hope’s Hill in The Thirteenth Koyote, a lot of folks were left dead but at least the hellish mystical artifact known as the Menhir was removed from our world. Also, killer lycanthrope Glenn Amarok was finally dispatched. However, one story can beget others in the legendary days […]

Tricked Into Being Good Little Girls and Boys: Survival of the Dead

In the days following the dead’s rise, Sarge (Alan Van Sprang) convinces his fellow National Guardsmen Kenny (Eric Woolfe), Francisco (Stefano DiMatteo), and Tomboy (Athena Karkanis) to desert their unit and hit the road. After taking a brief turn as outlaws accosting and stealing weapons and food from travelers (an incident recorded during 2007’s Diary […]