

It’s a little-known fact that one of the all-time bestselling writers of westerns lived most of his life in the English market town of Melton Mowbray. JT Edson, who died in 2014, wrote more than 137 novels, most of them westerns, and claimed in all seriousness “never to have even been on a horse”. A former chip shop owner, Edson developed a love of escapist fantasy in his youth, and approached writing westerns just as he later approached writing sci-fi.

The world of the western is about as historically accurate about 19th-century America as the world of the Shire in Lord of the Rings is about pre-industrial England. Both are fantasy worlds, abstracted from reality, crafted by expert fantasists. The pre-eminent western author, Louis L’Amour, loved the mythology so deeply that he began to write novels as a way of escaping into it. Like sci-fi and fantasy authors, writers of westerns, even when their sales stretch into millions, remain at the margins of mainstream culture. So it seems almost inevitable that over time the western and the fantasy have cross-bred.

Stephen King, the master of rejuvenating pulp plotlines for today’s reader, can make a strong claim to owning the weird western as well. The Dark Tower series, which now stands at eight volumes, is the story of gunslinger Roland Deschain and his quest to reach the titular tower. Few among even King’s most hardcore fans would claim The Dark Tower his greatest work, but its blend of western imagery with fantasy quest story is, at times, hypnotic. King’s series undoubtedly influenced David Gemmel’s 1987 weird western, The Wolf in Shadow. Jon Shannow is the loner anti-hero to end all loner outsider heroes, and while Wolf in Shadow is lesser known than The Dark Tower, it is a far more accurate take on the western, a genre Gemmell clearly adored.

Joe Abercrombie’s Red Country is a weird western set in the same world as his First Law fantasy trilogy, although the connection is perhaps a little manufactured. Abercrombie has courted the title of Lord Grimdark, but that somewhat obscures the more interesting aspects of his work. To coin a pretentious but accurate term, Abercrombie is a “post-fantasist”, a writer who grew up immersed in Tolkien, Moorcock and Dungeons and Dragons, and who can’t resist poking at the boundaries of the genre he clearly also loves. “What if the wise old wizard is actually a dextrous con artist who leads the hero on a false quest?” is the kind of question an Abercrombie fantasy toys with.

Red Country continues Abercrombie’s quest to mash every other genre into fantasy, and the result lands somewhere between Charles Portis’s True Grit and the John Milius movie of Conan the Barbarian. Young heroine Shy South sets off on a quest for revenge to recover her kidnapped brother and sister, along the way hopping through a series of western set pieces in which Abercrombie can have fun asking “what would a gold rush town in a fantasy world be like?” Abercrombie is very skilled at delivering the kind of thunderous, violent climax both westerns and fantasy fans expect, and Red Country does not disappoint.

Molly Tanzer’s unique and beautifully imagined weird west romp Vermillion replaces grimdark quest fantasy with lush urban fantasy. Eloise “Lou” Merryweather is a Taoist “psychopomp”, gifted with the capacity to commune with the dead, and charged with the task of keeping a San Francisco of the 1800s safe from supernatural terrors. In common with her earlier book A Pretty Mouth, which won my search for indie-published sci-fi and fantasy, Vermilion displays Tanzer’s talents for quickfire banter, adorable characters, and almost preternatural skills at blending apparently disparate genres. As with so much of the most original fiction published in the atmosphere of today’s crushingly conservative book world, Vermilion comes from an independent press. Thanks to ebooks and Amazon that matters much less than it used to, and the adventures of psychopomp Lou Meryweather are finding a passionate cult readership.

Ben Galley was among the first wave of indie fantasy authors to find success on Amazon’s Kindle platform with his Emaneska fantasy series. Last year Galley returned with Bloodrush, first in the Scarlet Star trilogy. Tonmerion Hark is rudely awakened from his privileged youth by the death of Lord Hark, and hurled across the ocean to the very edge of the world: Wyoming! Bloodrush has yet to replicate the success of Galley’s breakthrough The Written, which is a shame. In the interim, Galley has gone from interesting young fantasy writer to a talented author of great skill and imagination. There’s a fascinating tension inherent in the weird western, between the epic fantasy where the hero is able to triumph over evil, and the gritty western where evil is intrinsic to the world. Galley plays on that tension expertly, guiding Tonmerion on his journey of discovery.

I’ve barely scratched the genre’s surface here. Stark Holborn’s Nunslinger added a Catholic twist to the weird western when serialised last year. The novels of Joe R Lansdale – horror fiction’s answer to Cormac McCarthy – range so widely through the western mythology that he challenges King as father of the weird western. Catherynne M Valente, American fantasy writing’s best-kept secret, expressed her unique take on the fantasy western in stories Six Gun Snow White and The Shoot-Out at Burnt Corn Ranch Over the Bride of the World. But the weird western is still waiting for its breakout hit. Could Tanzer or Galley provide it? If not, no doubt another young writer will step forward to meet the challenge – and collect the paycheque.