Keith Allison, Author at Diabolique Magazine

The American old west, for all its potential, is a setting to which many horror creators have been resistant. The identification of the western (especially in print, where Zane Gray and Louis L'Amour remain to this day the titans of the genre) with a spirit and a fanbase largely incompatible with horror fans, possibly makes it an unappealing setting. The western is a strongly defined genre with its own set of conventions, expectations, and perhaps most importantly, a sphere of appeal that is regarded by many as exclusionary of the average horror fan (it's not, but perception is a powerful thing). Westerns are things old, conservative dads watch, and as such, it's not an attractive genre for horror fans—unless, of course, it's from Italy, in which case the films can serve as a bridge between fandoms in the same way that punks and metalheads (traditional enemies, where I grew up) can meet on the common ground of Motorhead. It's not that it isn't there—just that it seems like there should be more, what with all that lore and those vast lonely places that typify the American old west, especially when compared to the concurrent Victorian era in Britain, which has the same silk and velvet waistcoats but decidedly more book and movies wet within its milieu. Many of the films that do make use of the setting end up playing out more like action/adventure films than horror. This is where I'd place Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk till Dawn (1996), for instance, though it's not my place to enforce my opinion of where one genre ends and the other begins on those of you who define things differently. Some do indeed venture out into the desert, and the results, while mixed, have produced some quality work: Ravenous (1999), for example, and The Burrowers (2008). In recent years, with the expansion of small publishers and self-publishing revitalizing horror fiction (likely with an assist from so many horror-tinted spaghetti westerns finding their way onto home video, to say nothing of the popularity of the video game, Red Dead Redemption), there's been more new written horror set in the old west, as well as retrospectives of pioneers such as Robert E. Howard (never shy about exploring the western) and weird western pulp writer Lon Williams (whose stories showcase the common limitations of pulp but are pretty fun for what they are and if not read close to one another). The folk horror of the American west, sourced both from indigenous people as well as colonizers, is finally being explored with greater frequency. One of the most eye-catching additions to the canon of old west horror, thanks in large part to their splashy covers, is the "Splatter Western" series from Death's Head Press, an independent publishing house founded by Jarod Barbee and Patrick C. Harrison III. Currently sitting at thirteen self-contained books (though there are some characters from one appear in another) from several authors, the Splatter Western series leans heavily, as you can likely guess, into gore and horror along the lonely trails, rickety towns, and mysterious caverns of the old west. Within those parameters, the books delve into a variety of subgenres and styles, from folk to Lovecraftian horror, slashers to zombies—with occasional ghosts. The first four books (The Magpie Coffin, Wile E. Young; Hunger on the Chisholm Trail, Mike Ennenbach; Dust, Chris Miller; and The Night Silver River Run Red, Christine Morgan) set the stage for what is to come. Each book trades in the conventions of both horror and the western, combining tales of wayfaring strangers out for bloody revenge with tales of wayfaring strangers possessed of mystical knowledge that will come in handy when the ghouls and demons and the occasional Elder God ride over the range. If you made them into movies, Klaus Kinski would be in all four, and David Hess in at least one. Comparison to film is warranted, as the influence of spaghetti westerns (especially the few directed by Lucio Fulci of Zombie fame) is heavy. Some are better than others, but none of the four are bad, and all of them are short enough and packed with enough bloody horror that even at their shakiest, they're never less than entertaining. The Magpie Coffin Young's The Magpie Coffin (2020) starts the series off strong, with a tale about Salem Covington, known in many parts as the Black Magpie. Covington prowls the American frontier, collecting lore and legends of a dark and terrible nature, as well as the occasional damned soul. When he receives word that his mentor in things supernatural, the Comanche shaman Dead Bear, has been murdered, Salem loads the not-so-peaceful corpse of his teacher into an enchanted coffin, presses a dubious soldier into his service, and sets out on the red path of revenge. Said revenge will bring him into contact with more than just run-of-the-mill outlaws and gunslingers. The Magpie Coffin deftly balances the horror and western genres, making the most of the places where the two naturally intersect—tension, violence, atmosphere, and place. It makes the most of the bleak, epic landscapes of the west, from sun-parched deserts to snowy mountain towns. Young parcels out violent western and supernatural elements with a good pace as the Magpie drifts through an episodic but connected series of quests and revelations infused with murder, spirits, and dark magic. Hunger on the Chisholm Trail Mike Ennenbach's Hunger on the Chisholm Trail (2020), the second book in the series, ventures into the zombie territory one could pretty much expect was going to make itself known early on. This is, however, a variation on the theme, setting loose a wendigo hungry for human flesh. Like skinwalkers (and, to be fair, zombies and vampires and werewolves and just about every creature born from folklore), the nature of a wendigo tends to vary from story to story, especially as the old Algonquin tales were picked up by French and English frontiersmen, who inevitably misinterpreted and mixed the stories with beasts from their own mythologies. Algernon Blackwood conjured such a wind-walking beast in his short story, The Wendigo (1910), a tale of hunters in the Canadian wilderness who succumb to the madness of isolation and are set upon by an unseen creature that travels with the wind and takes the form of a member of their party. The wendigo, in some forms more authentic to the old tales than others, became a fixture of much weird fiction in the 1930s, with August Derleth in particular, returning to the creature many times and never quite being able to make up his mind what it was. Of more recent vintage, the afore-mentioned western/horror hybrid Ravenous invokes the wendigo, in the form of a fiend hungry for human flesh and with the ability to possess. I can't claim much in the way of authentic wendigo bona fides—my first exposure to the creature was in “Cry of the Wendigo,” a story from Amazing Spider-man #277, in which Spider-man is out and about in a blizzard blown down from Canada, during which he finds himself the protector of a little girl pursued by kidnappers, who are themselves being pursued by something decidedly more elemental in the wind. Granted, it's been decades since I read the issue, but it struck young me as haunting and atmospheric, and I recall it fondly (if vaguely). Hunger on the Chisholm Trail's wendigo is very much of the Ravenous type, also very much in alignment with old tales in which it is an evil, cannibalistic supernatural being that dwells in the cold and is attracted to famine and privation. A group of cowboys gets a crash course in wendigo appetites when they run afoul of one on a long and lonely cattle drive. The creature lurks on the periphery of such trails, drifting ever closer to an isolated town called Duncan. Also on the trail is Karl Beck, another outlaw/wanderer with a store of esoteric occult knowledge (one expects one will encounter quite a few of these men in the Splatter Western series) and the best chance of figuring out what is happening and how to stop the horrifying creature that comes to prey on the people of Duncan. Hunger on the Chisholm Trail is more slowly paced than its predecessor, more like an old Gothic horror than the fast-paced survival/action horror. It takes its time moseying down the trail, introducing characters, and working to develop them so that when the wendigo blows into town, the threat feels more substantial. For the most part, this is time well-spent, though it's not always successful. Some of the attempts at dialect are rough, vacillating between overwrought and anachronistic. It settles down after a spell, though, and that slow ignites a thoroughly satisfying, gore- and action-packed siege finale. Dust Unlike his Texas contemporary Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft was East Coast to the core and never showed interest in the American western. However, the mythos that evolved from Lovecraft's writing proved endlessly adaptable and easily transported to other settings. Chris Miller's Dust (2020) is the first in the Splatter Western series to venture into the rich and convoluted world of Lovecraftian cosmic horror, though with a protagonist who is much more in the mold of Robert E. Howard's two-fisted tough guys than H.P.'s nervous fainting academics. James Dee (who made a cameo appearance in Hunger on the Chisholm Trail, meaning that while the books work independently of one another, they do still occur in the same shared universe), named for infamous English alchemist John Dee, is yet another wanderer with a store of arcane knowledge. His knowledge has led him to seek out the semi-mythical East Texas town of Dust, where something immensely evil is going to happen. Hot on his trail is another man with a fair share of occult knowledge and less altruistic ideas about how humanity might wield the nebulous horror lurking in Dust. The introduction of cosmic horror and Elder Gods makes Dust the most outré entry in the series so far. Alternate...