Hot Iron and Cold Blood: An Anthology of the Weird West

by Jeff Strand, David J. Schow, Jill Girardi, Ronald Kelly, Jesse Allen Champion

Overview

"Each short story is unique, carefully crafted, and memorable. A fun read from cover to cover." – MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW

Desperados and yellow-bellies be warned: These ain't your typical westerns...

Herein find legendary masters of anomalous Western and Horror stories—along with a posse of budding word-slingers—who all bring you an electrifying and frightening collection of extraordinary tales set in the Old West and beyond...

Within these pages, the improbable is made real: cowboys encounter a chimeric critter of the night; dinosaurs return as massive poltergeists; Chinese railroad workers are haunted by invisible frights; outlaws experience Cronenbergian body-horror; fallen-light stalks mother and daughter upon a wintry prairie; a headless horseman roams the badlands; otherworldly creatures hunt within our domain; screaming spectral birds nest within the damned; and gunslinging women with murderous skills annihilate foolish notions of a man's world.

These are just a handful of the offerings in this body of macabre lore. So, mount your saddle-horse and join this gang of rogue authors for a ride down dark trails of terror and unsettling thoroughfares that lead deep into strange, nightmarish territory. Here you gallop through places where law has no dominion and Death constantly deals a grim hand—and where the iron is red-hot and the blood drips ice-cold.

Featuring stories by Joe R. Lansdale, Edward Lee, David J. Schow, Jill Girardi, R.J. Jackson, Vivian Kasley, Owl Goinback, Kenzie Jennings, Jeff Strand, Wile E. Young, and more. Edited by Patrick R. McDonough with an introduction by R.J. Joseph

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639511389
Publisher:	Dead Sky Publishing
Publication date:	09/26/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	290
Sales rank:	387,550
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Jeff Strand is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of over 50 books, including Pressure, Clowns Vs. Spiders, and Twentieth Anniversary Screening. He has never participated in a railroad heist or been thrown out of the front window of a saloon, but he did visit Tombstone. Several of his books are in development as motion pictures...a slow and maddening process. He won the Splatterpunk Award twice and lost one other time, but the loss was to Jack Ketchum, so it' s all good. He also lost the Bram Stoker Award to Peter Straub, Jonathan Maberry, and Stephen King (twice) before his eventual victory. DAVID J. SCHOW is a multiple-award-winning American writer. Ten novels, thirteen short story collections, comics (John Carpenter' s Tales of Science Fiction — “ The Standoff“ and “ HELL” ), movies (The Crow, Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, The Hills Run Red), television (Masters of Horror, Mob City, Creepshow), nonfiction (The Outer Limits Companion, The Art of Drew Struzan), and can be seen on various DVDs as expert witness or documentarian on everything from Creature from the Black Lagoon to Psycho to I, Robot. Jill Girardi is the award-nominated, internationally best-selling author of Hantu Macabre. A film based on the book with the same title is currently in the works (directed by Aaron Cowan, a senior member of the visual effects team that won four Oscars for Avatar and Lord of the Rings.) Jill is also the founder of Kandisha Press, an independent publishing company dedicated to promoting women horror authors around the world. She is currently working on Hantu Macabre 2, a short story collection, and a novella titled “ Mangrove Jack.” RONALD KELLY was born November 20, 1959, in Nashville, Tennessee. He attended Pegram Elementary School and Cheatham County Central High School, and, during his junior and senior years, had aspirations of become a comic book artist before his interests turned to writing ?ction. Ronald Kelly began his professional writing career in the horror genre in 1986 with the sale of his ?rst short story, “ Breakfast Serial” to Terror Time Again magazine. Specializing in tales of Southern horror, his work was widely published. Jesse Allen Champion is a native Texan and writer of frequent western-themed stories. From Texas to California, Jesse has worked at dude-ranching, theatre management, technical writing, and editing. As comfortable on a horse as a keyboard, Jesse' s fiction remembers the Old West, with the tumbleweed going wherever it will and a man on horseback as the ultimate arbiter of good and evil. Rhonda Jackson Garcia, AKA RJ Joseph, is an award winning, 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. Drew Huff is the author of Free Burn, coming out on March 2024. Born and raised in eastern Washington, she enjoys writing stories that explore the intricacies of trauma, body horror, and fear. Her short fiction, “ Word of Nellie,” is the closing story in Darklit Press' s “ The Sacrament” anthology. Another short story was included in Hungry Shadow Press' s anthology, “ It Was All a Dream,” and another short story, “ Old