Once a narrowly defined genre—set in the American frontier of the 19th Century—the definition of Western has expanded with contemporary takes from such authors as Cormac McCarthy, Ivy Pochoda, Alma Katsu, Jim Harrison and Louise Erdrich.
And now, along comes HOT IRON AND COLD BLOOD: An Anthology of the Weird West (September 26, 2023; Dead Sky Publishing), in which 17 legendary masters of anomalous Western and Horror stories—along with a posse of budding word-slingers—serve up an electrifying and frightening collection of extraordinary tales set in the Old West and beyond. These macabre, genre-blending tales invite you to saddle up and ride down dark trails of terror and unsettling thoroughfares that lead deep into strange, nightmarish territory, galloping through places where law has no dominion and Death constantly deals a grim had—and where the iron is red-hot and the blood drips ice-cold.
For a window into how these gunslinging and chilling tales were commissioned and created, we asked anthology editor and contributor Patrick R. McDonough, contributor and anthology-foreword-writer Rhonda Jackson Joseph, authors Joe R. Lansdale, Ronald Kelly and Briana Morgan, and Dead Sky co-publisher Steve Wands to share their insights into what Westerns mean to them, what their lens into “weird west” looks like, the future of Western fiction and more.
PRM: Patrick R. McDonough, editor and author
RJJ: Rhonda Jackson Joseph, contributed the foreword, author
RK: Ronald Kelly, author
JRL: Joe R. Lansdale, author
BM: Briana Morgan, author
SW: Steve Wands, publisher (Death’s Head Press, Dead Sky Publishing)
What does the West mean to you?
Steve Wands: Immediately I think of the wild west. Exploration, the gold rush, kicking in saloon doors and throwing the barkeep a coin and drinking some rotgut swill. Cacti and campfire, sleeping under an open sky and waking to endless possibilities and the threat of likely violence.
Ronald Kelly: Personally, I’ve always had a great interest and love for American history around the Civil War and Western Expansion time periods. I had ancestors fight for both the North and South, and my maternal great-great grandfather was said to have been a Confederate spy who fled from Tennessee to the West and wandered through the New Mexico and Arizona territories. So, my interest in Old West history started from those family stories I heard my grandmother tell when I was a child. I reckon it’s only natural that I would want to explore those time periods in my own fiction.
Patrick Robert McDonough: It means a whole lot of things: death, love, violence, brutality, opportunity and prospect.
Briana Morgan: Horses and cowboys. Deserts. Tumbleweeds. The struggle of good versus evil. Sepia tones. Lots of natural beauty, but also violence. I love the rough “uncivilized” aspect of Western stories, and I’m thrilled I got the chance to write about it.
Joe R. Lansdale: The West is a myth and a truth at the same time. Once upon the time anything west of the coast was the West, and a lot of it was pretty wild.
Rhonda Jackson Joseph: To me, the West means opportunity. So much of the history is mythologized, as Joe said, but the fact it represents possibilities is the thing that stands out most.
What does a weird fiction lens add to our understanding of the Old West?
JRL: It can be good or bad. That depends on the story and the writer. But I think it’s a nice way to look at an old myth, and a way to create new ones.
RK: I believe the nature of Western history and those who lived during those times hold an inherent darkness that melds well with weird and horror fiction. Many of the classic gunfighters and outlaws from Old West lore were sociopaths or folks mentally and emotionally damaged by the horrors of war. If you look at a lot of the infamous characters in Western history, their lifestyles weren’t a far cry from the type of dark, weird western fiction that’s being penned today.
RJJ: Absolutely, Ronald! As a native Texan who has lived here all my life, much of what happens here is totally weird–and this is still our lifestyle. The Houston area is a real life weird mix of rural and urban sensibilities. Our stories of spirits, land that speaks to us, and strange creatures are the norm, though it all sounds strange to those outside the area. Specifically being a Black Texan adds an additional layer to the uncanny as much of the cultural spirituality I grew up with and still practice maintains the mystique of the weird West.
BM: We’re not writing your grandfather’s wild West stories anymore. I’m not saying traditional Western narratives can’t be violent or even strange in their own ways—it’s just that weird Westerns are unapologetic in their weirdness in a way “normal” Westerns typically aren’t.
SW: To me, the old west has always been a little weird. Whether it’s the horrors of war as Ronald said, or the strange creatures Rhonda mentioned. The unknown has a way of being strange, and to many that the west was just that. But maybe adding that lens of weird just gives permission to dwell on those elements, to linger almost too long in a ghost town, or to poke at those old myths Joe noted.
What was your take on the “weird fiction” aspect for your story?
RK: For my story “The Night of El Maldito”, I wanted to take the classic werewolf trope and put a dark Western twist to it; sort of inject Old World lycanthropic mythology into a traditional Western storyline, in this case it takes place during a cattle drive across 1880s Wyoming. I also anchored the plot in Mexican supernatural folklore through the character of Mateo Delgado.
PRM: My story “It Calls” is about a mother and daughter witnessing the fall of a magnificent light. The little girl has a love for her translated-to-English Jules Verne books, and she can’t help but be in awe. The weird fiction part comes into play when that light starts to call for her… starts to show her things that shouldn’t be.
BM: In “Dread Creek,” I wanted to explore how a split-second compromise can have devastating consequences. I aimed for Cronenberg-esque body horror combined with shades of betrayal, jealousy, and gore. This was my first time writing a weird Western, and I loved every second of it. I’m hoping that enjoyment is apparent to the reader.
JRL: It felt natural to me. I just wanted to write a good engaging story, and that was it. But the West was a natural go-to for me.
RJJ: To write the foreword, I tapped into the weird vibes from the stories, themselves. These stellar writers were highly in tune with the tales the Western soil whispers about the lives lived on it and buried underneath it. The resilience of the characters, in the face of the escalating weirdness, was what really resonated with me.
Do you work in other genres as well? If so, what does that experience bring to your Western fiction writing?
BM: Obviously, I write horror, but my work tends to be more psychological. In the past, it wasn’t bloody. I stayed away from gore. The more I write, though, the darker and more violent my work gets. I want to write more nasty Western fiction, too.
RJJ: There can never be too much nasty Western fiction in the world! I write horror but I also write romance and academic pieces. The romance helps me stay in tune with the ways the West is romanticized sometimes, where there are rose colored glasses looking at the dust and foundations and seeing the positive in what they can become. The academic lens helps because I understand the actual history of the region, without that romanticization, and I love to incorporate those elements in my writing.
RK: Most of my genre fiction is Southern horror and dark suspense, but I have written in the Western genre, on and off, for the past 38 years. I did some ghostwriting for Berkley’s Jake Logan series in the early-90s and published a stand-alone traditional western novel titled Timber Gray. I’m currently working on the third installment of my weird-western series, The Saga of Dead-Eye, which incorporates a lot of supernatural and cosmic horror elements in the storyline.
JRL: I mostly write in crime and suspense, which is a broad field. But I write lots of things, and many of those things are mixed with a variety of genres.
Do you have a favorite Western? What is it?
PRM: I got two: Wile E Young’s The Magpie Coffin and Alma Katu’s The Hunger.
JRL: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is hands down my favorite Western. It changed Westerns and how they were perceived. It opened the door to broader interpretations. True Grit, the Coen version would be second.
The Charles Portis novel True Grit is toss-up with Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry for favorite Western novel. Quite fond of Little Big Man by Thomas Berger and Wild Times by Brian Garfield. Both were filmed. Little Big Man is one of the great ones, and Wild Times was a very fine made for TV movie.
RK: I read a lot of Louis L’Amour books during my teenage and young adult years, so I’d have to say my favorite is his series of Sackett books. They follow the Sackett family from their arrival in America, settling in Tennessee, and then their travels westward. The spirit and grittiness of L’Amour’s depiction of the West captivated my young imagination, and still does. As for my favorite weird western novel, it would have to be Mr. Lansdale’s The Magic Wagon.
BM: Brennan LaFaro’s Noose. And Red Dead Redemption 2 if that counts.
RJJ: I enjoyed the entire vibe throughout Nicole Givens-Kurtz’s Sisters of the Wild Sage: A Weird West Collection. Those sisters spoke to my very spirit. And I adored The Hungry Snow by Joe Lansdale–I may be in love with the Reverend and his supernatural exploits.
SW: Picking favorites is always difficult for me. Books, probably No Country for Old Men. For comics I really enjoyed the many iterations of Jonah Hex. But I’ve always been partial to western movies…Tombstone, Pale Rider, Near Dark, and Bone Tomahawk, to name a few.
How, in your observation, has the Western evolved over the past few decades?
RK: I think Western literature has grown more historically accurate in the past twenty or thirty years, mostly because of the wealth of information you can access online. Authors like L’Amour and Zane Gray didn’t have that advantage when they were writing and publishing. Also, the Western genre is becoming more gender and ethnic inclusive, which is a big plus.
PRM: That’s a good point, about the accuracy of Westerns. Got nothing else to add, Ron nailed it.
RJJ: The inclusivity is a huge plus. There were so many different experiences in the West, and we’re starting to hear from them. I think having these voices included in the documentation of the time period helps give us a more accurate picture of what was really happening and the impact of those events.
BM: Although I speak as someone on the outside looking in, Westerns have gotten stranger. They’ve gotten more diverse in unexpected ways, injecting more modern sensibilities into the stories.
JRL: It’s always evolving. Go back and read dime novels and they had a large number of weird westerns, but there are a lot of what I call modern westerns these days. The Hap and Leonard series is kind of a Western.
SW: New and diverse voices coming into the fold and injecting new points of view into the Western has caused the biggest evolution, in my opinion. We’ve also just come a long way from the days of good guys wearing white hats. Stories are more nuanced, the characters more real, genre less easily defined.
What is the future of Western fiction?
PRM: Like all good things, the evolution of Western fiction is hearing the voices, seeing the places, and experiencing the true grit and ugly side of how the Western Expansion played out. It’s what this anthology is all about, the stories uncommon to what many are familiar with seeing on the silver screen when it comes to Westerns.
RK: I think Western fiction will continue to be a favorite genre in the publishing industry, and if offshoots of that genre in the form of horror or weird westerns pull in a larger, more diverse readership, it’ll grow even stronger.
JRL: It’s what we make of it, but it does seem to be on the rise and I’m glad to be one of the instigators of the form.
BM: Western fiction, like horror, will continue to evolve. It will become more diverse in terms of authorship and content.
RJJ: Yes! The evolution will continue as various voices and experiences contribute to the genre. Westerns never really disappear, and having stories we haven’t seen before will keep it from cannibalizing itself and going away.
SW: Interest in western fiction will ebb and flow, just like in anything, but the future is always in the shapers of stories leaving bits of themselves in the work.
-What opportunities do you see to add to what we perceive as Western fiction? Are there other genre cross-overs you’d be interested in seeing (or creating)?
PRM: I see opportunities for writers exploring what may be unknown to most of us. A great example of that is Victor LaValle’s Lone Women. A story about a woman trying to escape her past by moving westward, and take advantage of free land from the government, so long as she can tame the land. It’s based on true situations, plus there’s a magic trunk too.
RK: I think the various ways Westerns are being presented these days are a positive step; not only western novels, but short fiction, novellas, and graphic novels. It reaches a varied readership that wouldn’t ordinarily pick up a traditional Western paperback. I really like the way the horror and suspense genres have embraced and adapted the Western mythos, and would love to see other genres try their hand at it as well, like science fiction and fantasy. I’m looking forward to continuing and completing my Dead-Eye series and bringing as many horrific and unorthodox images and situations to the storyline as my imagination can muster.
BM: I want to do my part to inject Western horror fiction with more diversity. I want to write queer protagonists exploring messed-up settings. I want to get darker, more violent, you know? I want to be involved in Western fiction’s evolution.
RJJ: I agree with all these sentiments. I’m currently finishing up a weird Western novella that’s pretty splattery but it also centers the experiences of a Black, female main character and a diverse cast. There’s also a central romance in the plot and while my writing could never possibly live up to Queen Beverly Jenkins’, I’m aiming for the master level of romantic storytelling that she employs in her historical romance novels.
SW: All I see are opportunities. In genre, in format. I’d love to see more western sci-fi specifically, but as long as creators are never afraid to take two things they love and smash them together I’ll be interested.
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Patrick R. McDonough is the editor of HOT IRON AND COLD BLOOD. He works as an editor, writer, and the producer/co-host of the Dead Headspace podcast. He’s a New Englander currently living in South Jersey with his wife, son, and pets. You can find his short fiction in various anthologies through Silent Hill Press, Cemetery Gates Media, and Crystal Lake Publishing.
Rhonda Jackson Joseph, who wrote the foreword for HOT IRON AND COLD BLOOD, is an award winning, Bram Stoker Award™ nominated, Texas based academic and creative writer/professor whose writing regularly focuses on the intersections of gender and race in the horror and romance genres and popular culture. She has had works published in various applauded venues, including the 2020 Halloween issue of Southwest Review and The Streaming of Hill House: Essays on the Haunting Netflix Series. Her debut horror collection, Hell Hath No Sorrow Like a Woman Haunted was released in August 2022 by The Seventh Terrace. Rhonda is also an instructor at the Speculative Fiction Academy and the co-host of the Genre Blackademia podcast.
Born and bred in Tennessee, HOT IRON AND COLD BLOOD contributor Ronald Kelly is the Splatterpunk Award-winning author of Southern-fried horror fiction with fifteen novels, twelve short story collections, a memoir (Southern Fried and Horrified; 2022; Dead Sky Publishing), and a Grammy-nominated audio collection to his credit. Influenced by such writers as Stephen King, Richard Matheson, Joe R. Lansdale, and Manly Wade Wellman, Kelly sets his tales of rural darkness in the hills and hollows of his native state. He lives in a backwoods hollow in Brush Creek, Tennessee with his wife, Joyce, and their young’uns.
Champion Mojo Storyteller and HOT IRON AND COLD BLOOD contributor Joe R. Lansdale has written novels and stories in many genres, including Western, horror, science fiction, mystery, and suspense. He has also written for comics, as well as “Batman: The Animated Series.” As of 2020, he has written 50 novels and published more than 30 short-story collections (maybe 40 by now?!) along with many chapbooks and comic-book adaptations. His stories have won ten Bram Stoker Awards, the British Fantasy Award, the Edgar Award, the American Horror Award, the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award, the Sugarprize, the Grinzane Cavour Prize for Literature, the Spur Award, and the Raymond Chandler Lifetime Achievement Award. He has been inducted into The Texas Literary Hall of Fame, and several of his novels have been adapted to film.
Briana Morgan (she/her), a HOT IRON AND COLD BLOOD contributor, is a horror author and playwright. Her books include The Reyes Incident, The Tricker-Treater and Other Stories, Unboxed: A Play, and more. She’s a proud member of the Horror Writers Association, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association, and the Alliance of Independent Authors.
Steve Wands, publisher of HOT IRON AND COLD BLOOD, is the Co-Publisher and Chief Creative Officer for Dead Sky Publishing and Death’s Head Press. He is best known as a Harvey Award-nominated and Lammy Award-winning comic book letterer with DC Comics, Image, TKO Studios, Dark Horse and others. When not working, he spends time with his family in New Jersey.
