Stories of werewolves, demons, zombies, ghosts, aliens, magic and otherworldly elements seem right at home amidst wild mountains, endless desert and a vast, unforgiving landscape. It has been around as long as the “old west” aesthetic itself. Simply put, the Weird West genre mashes western elements with other genres ranging from horror, scifi and fantasy. Both readers and writers can tap into fresh perspectives and fantastical elements in a Old West that never fails to, in equal parts, inspire and terrify. Rather than another story romanticizing Wyatt Earp or the Lone Ranger (as fun as those can be), the Weird West offers a new frontier of exploration. In the deluge of today’s reboots and retellings, audiences hunger for original stories.

The scene is all too familiar in old western stories, along with iconic characters ranging from outlaws, gunslingers and law-keepers.įor better or worse, the stoic cowboy hero archetype helped set the foundation for some of today’s superheroes and modern American fiction.īut the Weird West genre offers a fresh take on the iconic-and sometimes overused-imagery and caricatures of the Old West. Poker players and prostitutes scramble as the loner saunters in, steely eyes prepping for a showdown. This is a standalone book in the Coilhunter Chronicles series, which can be read in any order.A figure silhouetted in a hat and dusty jacket bursts into a bar. That'll include some six-shooters of his own. Caught between these six shooters, Nox'll have to use everything he's got to restore the peace. The Wild North was bad enough, but these six powerful clans are about to show bad it can be. This time, a tit-for-tat feud has brought two gangs to the brink of war, with four more gangs pulled in from a string of uneasy alliances. Normally he has to gun them down one by one, but every so often the gangs do a little culling of their own. Nox, the Coilhunter, has spent years culling the number of gangs throughout the lawless land known as the Wild North, but the numbers keep on growing.

Coilhunter by Dean F. Wilson