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I enjoy a good Western now and then. Mainly cinematic ones, though I have read a number of novels over the years. The weird western is a relatively new phenomenon, emerging probably from some of the writings of Joe R. Landsdale and others, though he writes a more contemporary version, not to mention the recent surge of steampunk westerns.

Many of the 23 stories in Dead Man’s Hand (Titan Books), edited by the ever-reliable John Joseph Adams, feature vampires, elves, dragons, shape-shifters, magicians, fae, even dinosaurs. Others involve alien invasions or clockwork automata.

Of the latter category you’ll find plenty of fun stories. Though some of the writers push the boundaries, most stick closely within the paramaters of steampunk that won’t offend fans who want more of the same.

While here and there I began to grow weary of cowboys and automata and cowboys and aliens (I loved the eponymous movie by the way, and the author of the graphic novel on which it’s based, Fred Van Lente, has a very solid, fascinating tale here called Neversleeps) along comes Jeffrey Ford, for instance, with a superb horror story, and Ken Liu with a powerful tale about the abuse of immigrant labor and the magical properties of the written word.

Another boundary-pusher is David Farland. His “Hell on the High Frontier” sees a ranger hunting for a murderous clockwork soldiers – a tale wrapped in darkness, human frailty and courage against the odds.

Equally, if the supernatural weird is your thing you’ll love Joe R. Landsdale’s “The Red-Headed Dead” in which a preacher hunts down a truly grotesque vampire, and Laura Anne Gilman, in her somewhat better tale, “The Devil’s Jack,” with its haunted loner working to literally get the devil off his back.

Speaking of the devil, Mike Resnick’s truly creepy The Hell-Bound Stagecoach owes something to the classic Elizabeth Bowen story, The Demon Lover.

Walter John Williams, best known for hard science fiction surprised me, when I realised his excellent, The Golden Age was actually a superhero story. His Condor will certainly appeal to Batman fans, while his use of prose, illustrating the linguistic rhythms of how early settlers might have actually spoken, made the story all the richer.

Another prose stylist is Elizabeth Bear, who’s wonderful dialect in Madam Damnable’s Sewing Circle makes for delightful reading.

Orson Scott Card’s Alvin and the Apple Tree is full of wit, warmth and humanity and has all the reasonance of myth.

If straightforward adventure is your thing, you’ll love this anthology. In truth, while I enjoyed it enormously, from time to time, as I said before, it was a welcome change of pace to be reading some of the true stylists I’ve mentioned above. There are others in the anthology, too, of course, but I feel I should conclude with special mention of Christie Yant, whose endpiece, Dead Man’s Hand could have worked just as well as the first story; it demonstrates the use of the unreliable narrator in differing newspaper accounts of the death of Wild Bill Hicock and the famous card spread he left on the table after being shot.

In summary, I’d say that Dead Man’s Hand is a terrific anthology of weird western tales that will keep you entertained for many an evening.

However, in my view, the word “weird” suggests strangeness, surprise, unexplained bizarreness, the surreal, the horrific, the experimental, the playful, the grotesque.

By my definitions, then, this anthology almost wasn’t quite weird enough.