Gutshot: Weird West Stories

by Conrad Williams (Editor), Alan Peter Ryan, James Lovegrove

The place of the cowboy in fiction is wrapped up in violence and elegiac beauty. Their stories are underpinned by misery and threat. But in among the guns, knives and blood, there was love and hope and glory. The 20 tales between these covers offer a bizarre take on the myths of the Old West. You are as likely to meet a villain from the 21st century as a varmint from the 19th. There are monsters, real and imagined. There are ghosts and gangsters, masked men and marauders. There are showdowns and final sunsets. Above all there is the kind of awe that we all yearn for in our stories. Gutshot is a Smith & Wesson gripped by a skeletal fist, chambers loaded with alien ice, muzzle pointed at your heart . . .

CONTENTS

Introduction by Conrad Williams
Passage by Alan Peter Ryan
The Black Rider by James Lovegrove
The Alabaster Child by Cat Sparks
The Ghost Warriors by Michael Moorcock
Blue Norther by Zander Shaw
In the Sand Hills by Thomas Tessier
White Butterflies by Stephen Volk
El Camino de Rojo by Gary McMahon
The Bones that Walk by Joe R Lansdale
Ghosts by Amanda Hemingway
The Boy Thug by Christopher Fowler
Kiss the Wolf by Simon Bestwick
Waiting for the Bullet by Mark Morris
Carrion Cowboy by Paul Meloy
Some Kind of Light Shines from Your Face by Gemma Files
Splinters by Peter Crowther and Rio Youers
All Our Hearts are Ghosts by Peter Atkins
Beasts of Burden by Sarah Langan
What God Hath Wrought? by Adam Nevill
Those Who Remember by Joel Lane

Genres: Anthologies, Horror

336 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2011

About the author

In 2007 Conrad Williams won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel for The Unblemished. In 2008 he won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novella, for The Scalding Rooms. In 2010 he won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel for One.

Reviews

[Kevin Lucia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lots of anthologies today have two good stories and 10 throw-aways. Not this one. Almost every single story in here knocks it out of the park. This is what anthologies should be like.

[Christopher Teague · Rating 5 out of 5]

Put simply, this is an unmissable anthology.

What do you think of when you read the words 'wild west fiction': cowboys and indians, Louis L'Amour, Sergio Leone? Conrad Williams as collated a book of stories that has all that, but all with a subtle change in delivery or style, yet still in keeping with the whole wild west mythos of the man with no name, the violence, and the spiritualism of the native American. to name just three tropes.

Wrapped inside a lovely hardcover from PS Publishing, if you love short stories then you really, really should get this...