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The Lon Williams Weird Western Megapack: 25 Fantastic Western Stories
Lon Thomas Williams (1890 - 1978) was an American author best known for publishing a large number of traditional and weird western stories in the pulp magazines. One of Williams' most popular series featured Deputy Marshal Lee Winters (a series of "weird westerns," containing fantastic or outre elements) which are collected in this volume. Included KING SOLOMON'S THRONE
FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH
SATAN'S WOOL-MERCHANT
MASTER OF INDECISION
A DESERT HIPPOCRATES
THE HAUNTED TOWN
PHANTOM CARGO
WIZARD OF FORLORN GAP
A PORTION TO SEVEN
MARK OF THE WAMPUS CAT
GOLDEN CITY
LONG LIVE THE KING
LANTERN IN THE SKY
THE SALT WAGONS
THE HONEY JUG
TRAIL OF PAINTED ROCKS
THE CUCKOO'S NEST
THE WATER CARRIERS
THE STRANGE PIPER
MEN BURNING BRUSH
THE BANSHEE SINGER
THE DANCING TREES
THE DEADLY SLOWPOKE
THE THREE FATES
THE MAGIC GRINDSTONE
And don't forget to search this ebook store for Wildside Megapack to see more entries in this series, covering classic authors and subjects like mysteries, science fiction, westerns, ghost stories -- and much, much more!"
FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH
SATAN'S WOOL-MERCHANT
MASTER OF INDECISION
A DESERT HIPPOCRATES
THE HAUNTED TOWN
PHANTOM CARGO
WIZARD OF FORLORN GAP
A PORTION TO SEVEN
MARK OF THE WAMPUS CAT
GOLDEN CITY
LONG LIVE THE KING
LANTERN IN THE SKY
THE SALT WAGONS
THE HONEY JUG
TRAIL OF PAINTED ROCKS
THE CUCKOO'S NEST
THE WATER CARRIERS
THE STRANGE PIPER
MEN BURNING BRUSH
THE BANSHEE SINGER
THE DANCING TREES
THE DEADLY SLOWPOKE
THE THREE FATES
THE MAGIC GRINDSTONE
And don't forget to search this ebook store for Wildside Megapack to see more entries in this series, covering classic authors and subjects like mysteries, science fiction, westerns, ghost stories -- and much, much more!"
409 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 6, 2014
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40 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 30, 2016
This very peculiar series of weird westerns featuring Deputy Marshal Lee Winters was a hit with readers of Real Western Stories in the 1950s. I think they're a hoot, and they retain much of the eccentric charm which likely sold them to their original audience.
It's evident from other Goodreads reviews that the first thing to strike the modern reader about these yarns is their unabashed repetition of narrative structure: the first seven or eight stories in the series are almost identical in even fairly minor plot details. This would have been less disturbing to pulp readers, who were not only accustomed to formulae, but embraced them: the appeal of countless 'series' pulps lay not in the expectation of radical variations of plot fundamentals, but in the quirky ideas or clever tricks with which a talented writer would festoon a familiar structure. And if these stories are anything to go by, quirkiness was, for Lon Williams, merely a point of departure.
The first tale, King Solomon's Throne, furnishes the initial plot template, but more importantly, establishes the characters and setting used throughout the series. We are introduced to demoralized, frightened, middle-aged lawman Lee Winters, and his only friend, saloon-keeper Doc Bogannon, a former Boston Brahmin who has abandoned his past so that he may observe with an oddly indiscriminate benignity the flotsam and jetsam who wash up at his bar. This bar is located in no ordinary town, but in the liminal, largely deserted crossroads mining town of Forlorn Gap, which seems to possess an inexorable attraction for the West's most deranged or visionary inhabitants.
Most of the stories open with Winters fearfully traversing the town's environs at night as he returns home from yet another harrowing encounter with what he calls "wanted monkeys", outlaws to whose presence he has been alerted by a superior in another town. No matter what route he takes, he always seems to have to cope with Alkali Flat, a lifeless and blighted region, so inhospitable that after crossing it he must bathe his face in vinegar to relieve his alkali burns, but which, by night, somehow teems with unwholesome activity: mysterious voices and sounds, spectral men and beasts. Winters' home offers slight refuge: his schoolteacher wife entertains him with storybook tales of mythical horror, while impossible sounds drift in through the window from the Flat: singing, strange music, cries of longing or terror or pain.
King Solomon's Throne starts things off mildly enough with an unhinged man who believes himself King Solomon; he has set up a throne out on the Flat, and acolytes bring him avaricious transients whom they have beguiled with promises of a cave filled with gold: once in the King's clutches, they are executed to the accompaniment of sung instructions that the victim's shade must wander east in search of the great conquerors of antiquity, who are to bring millions of followers to rendezvous with Solomon at Armageddon. The tale is filled with grotesques, and is told with an irony reminiscent of Clark Ashton Smith, but at this point Williams' storytelling is tidy and almost conventional, apart from the outlandish central premise: everything (except the hellish Flat) is explained, and order is more or less restored at the end. As the series progresses, the premises become more bizarre; little, if anything, is explained; and any sense of order collapses as Winters' experiences grow increasingly hallucinatory.
Story number nine, A Portion to Seven (which is what Straight Gate and Narrow Gate keep asking people for), is the first to hint that the plot structure hitherto employed is on its way out. Bogannon's past is explored, and there is a sad episode in which Winters and his wife go out to look at a house lot, dreaming wistfully of an escape from their little hell. In the next story, Mark of the Wampus Cat, eccentricity completely overwhelms the series. It opens with Winters enjoying the campfire hospitality of Lost Robert, whom he had last seen as a mutilated corpse. This unexplained trailside encounter is the first of many such: in the course of his subsequent nocturnal homecomings Winters must endure the company of any number of capricious spectral or fey beings. But that's just first few pages of the tale: Winters goes on to witness "an exhibition of thought and wish and retribution", involving Hannibal's elephants and bursting egotists; at the end Winters is forced to do battle with Socrates, Philenus Purr's lightning-fast Wampus Cat.
The rest of the series holds true to this odd, playful combination of supernatural mystery and the western tall tale, with doses of ancient history and Greek myth thrown in. Winters meets Guy Fawkes, the Man in the Moon, Pan, and, in The Honey Jug, an arch-fiend from The Pilgrim's Progress. Keeping all this nuttiness in check is Winters' consistent misery and confusion, Bogannon's voice of sympathy and reason, and the unfathomable strangeness of the Flat.
It's all stimulating enough to lead the reader to speculate about what is 'really' going on. There is a clear implication in the stories themselves that Winters' increasingly weird experiences are the result of taking too much punishment from the "wanted monkeys". The suggestion of another Goodreader that Winters is actually the victim of alcoholic delusion is interesting (he does spend a lot of time at Bogannon's bar). At the end of the series, Winters concludes that "There ain't no such things as ghosts; they exist only in people's minds." But he has previously brought back plenty of hard evidence from his encounters to suggest otherwise.
I suppose at this point I should issue a caveat. Williams writes for the reader's entertainment; he is not consciously creating art. His style is sometime flat, although he possesses a genuine gift for quickly establishing atmosphere. I don't want to oversell him. But if you approach him as a pulp hack, you will be surprised by his ingenuity and unfettered imagination. Those who have a taste for this sort of thing will find him a refreshing change from the High Seriousness and self-importance of many modern writers of weird fiction.
It's evident from other Goodreads reviews that the first thing to strike the modern reader about these yarns is their unabashed repetition of narrative structure: the first seven or eight stories in the series are almost identical in even fairly minor plot details. This would have been less disturbing to pulp readers, who were not only accustomed to formulae, but embraced them: the appeal of countless 'series' pulps lay not in the expectation of radical variations of plot fundamentals, but in the quirky ideas or clever tricks with which a talented writer would festoon a familiar structure. And if these stories are anything to go by, quirkiness was, for Lon Williams, merely a point of departure.
The first tale, King Solomon's Throne, furnishes the initial plot template, but more importantly, establishes the characters and setting used throughout the series. We are introduced to demoralized, frightened, middle-aged lawman Lee Winters, and his only friend, saloon-keeper Doc Bogannon, a former Boston Brahmin who has abandoned his past so that he may observe with an oddly indiscriminate benignity the flotsam and jetsam who wash up at his bar. This bar is located in no ordinary town, but in the liminal, largely deserted crossroads mining town of Forlorn Gap, which seems to possess an inexorable attraction for the West's most deranged or visionary inhabitants.
Most of the stories open with Winters fearfully traversing the town's environs at night as he returns home from yet another harrowing encounter with what he calls "wanted monkeys", outlaws to whose presence he has been alerted by a superior in another town. No matter what route he takes, he always seems to have to cope with Alkali Flat, a lifeless and blighted region, so inhospitable that after crossing it he must bathe his face in vinegar to relieve his alkali burns, but which, by night, somehow teems with unwholesome activity: mysterious voices and sounds, spectral men and beasts. Winters' home offers slight refuge: his schoolteacher wife entertains him with storybook tales of mythical horror, while impossible sounds drift in through the window from the Flat: singing, strange music, cries of longing or terror or pain.
King Solomon's Throne starts things off mildly enough with an unhinged man who believes himself King Solomon; he has set up a throne out on the Flat, and acolytes bring him avaricious transients whom they have beguiled with promises of a cave filled with gold: once in the King's clutches, they are executed to the accompaniment of sung instructions that the victim's shade must wander east in search of the great conquerors of antiquity, who are to bring millions of followers to rendezvous with Solomon at Armageddon. The tale is filled with grotesques, and is told with an irony reminiscent of Clark Ashton Smith, but at this point Williams' storytelling is tidy and almost conventional, apart from the outlandish central premise: everything (except the hellish Flat) is explained, and order is more or less restored at the end. As the series progresses, the premises become more bizarre; little, if anything, is explained; and any sense of order collapses as Winters' experiences grow increasingly hallucinatory.
Story number nine, A Portion to Seven (which is what Straight Gate and Narrow Gate keep asking people for), is the first to hint that the plot structure hitherto employed is on its way out. Bogannon's past is explored, and there is a sad episode in which Winters and his wife go out to look at a house lot, dreaming wistfully of an escape from their little hell. In the next story, Mark of the Wampus Cat, eccentricity completely overwhelms the series. It opens with Winters enjoying the campfire hospitality of Lost Robert, whom he had last seen as a mutilated corpse. This unexplained trailside encounter is the first of many such: in the course of his subsequent nocturnal homecomings Winters must endure the company of any number of capricious spectral or fey beings. But that's just first few pages of the tale: Winters goes on to witness "an exhibition of thought and wish and retribution", involving Hannibal's elephants and bursting egotists; at the end Winters is forced to do battle with Socrates, Philenus Purr's lightning-fast Wampus Cat.
The rest of the series holds true to this odd, playful combination of supernatural mystery and the western tall tale, with doses of ancient history and Greek myth thrown in. Winters meets Guy Fawkes, the Man in the Moon, Pan, and, in The Honey Jug, an arch-fiend from The Pilgrim's Progress. Keeping all this nuttiness in check is Winters' consistent misery and confusion, Bogannon's voice of sympathy and reason, and the unfathomable strangeness of the Flat.
It's all stimulating enough to lead the reader to speculate about what is 'really' going on. There is a clear implication in the stories themselves that Winters' increasingly weird experiences are the result of taking too much punishment from the "wanted monkeys". The suggestion of another Goodreader that Winters is actually the victim of alcoholic delusion is interesting (he does spend a lot of time at Bogannon's bar). At the end of the series, Winters concludes that "There ain't no such things as ghosts; they exist only in people's minds." But he has previously brought back plenty of hard evidence from his encounters to suggest otherwise.
I suppose at this point I should issue a caveat. Williams writes for the reader's entertainment; he is not consciously creating art. His style is sometime flat, although he possesses a genuine gift for quickly establishing atmosphere. I don't want to oversell him. But if you approach him as a pulp hack, you will be surprised by his ingenuity and unfettered imagination. Those who have a taste for this sort of thing will find him a refreshing change from the High Seriousness and self-importance of many modern writers of weird fiction.
November 29, 2022
Man, was that a disappointment. Schematic, Scooby-Doo level stories, a lot of them indistinguishable from each other, all of them not worth bringing back from well-deserved obscurity. Lazy plotting, lazy characterization copy-pasted from story to story, mostly uninspired hackwork.
June 5, 2025
A collection of highly repetitive stories. Listen, I love pulp, I love horror and supernatural tales, and though I'm not as well versed in them as some other genres, I really do like a nice Western from time to time. Weird Westerns were a subgenre I'd been wanting to explore for some time, and so was excited when I found this collection on the Amazon store.
Reading it through, I was reminded of the Stephen King quote from On Writing (which I shall now paraphrase and likely butcher): "Life is too short to waste on bad books." and I likely stuck with this one far longer than I should have. I'd read a review earlier that said the collection picked up after story number seven and so wanted to keep with it until then - after all, sometimes it takes an author a while to really get into their flow with a character.
And that review was correct... to an extent. the first seven stories, or so all have the same plot. Deputy Sheriff Winters rides across the Alkalai Flats at night and hears something, reminding him it was supposed to be haunted. He goes to the local tavern where we meet a local eccentric. THAT eccentric then meets a second eccentric who lures him outside. Winters goes home to his wife, sleeps with the window open, and hears 'something' outside (sometimes it's a scream, or a gunshot) but chooses not to investigate. We flash forward a day or two, and Winters returns to the tavern and meets Eccentric 2, who lures HIM out into the desert, though the bartender tries to warn him. a confrontation occurs, Winters shoots the villain, and returns to the tavern for a glass of wine.
Literally the exact same outline for every story! Now, by about story 10 or so, a NEW plot rears its head. Here, Winters is in the desert, tracking a criminal, when he runs into a stranger who knows his name. despite his fear, he Engages and gets drawn into witnessing a marvel, which turns deadly when his host begins to challenge him. This story (because, once again, despite its iterations, they're all the same story) has more dream logic and is outright supernatural.
I'm so disappointed in this collection. Lon Williams is a writer of some note of this era - though hears best known for his SciFi stories - and I was really looking forward to some good tales. And there IS some potential in the characters (Doc is fun, even if under developed. And Winters and his faithful steed Cannonball ARE enjoyable protagonists) and the setting. But it's just ... wasted. maybe if I was reading one of these a month in my favorite pulp, the flaws wouldn't be so obvious. But one right after another in a row like this? oh god, it's painful.
(and yes, I am totally waiting for someone who has read them all to respond to this and tell me the second half is amazing; meaning I'm gonna have to pick this up again. Lol!)
Reading it through, I was reminded of the Stephen King quote from On Writing (which I shall now paraphrase and likely butcher): "Life is too short to waste on bad books." and I likely stuck with this one far longer than I should have. I'd read a review earlier that said the collection picked up after story number seven and so wanted to keep with it until then - after all, sometimes it takes an author a while to really get into their flow with a character.
And that review was correct... to an extent. the first seven stories, or so all have the same plot. Deputy Sheriff Winters rides across the Alkalai Flats at night and hears something, reminding him it was supposed to be haunted. He goes to the local tavern where we meet a local eccentric. THAT eccentric then meets a second eccentric who lures him outside. Winters goes home to his wife, sleeps with the window open, and hears 'something' outside (sometimes it's a scream, or a gunshot) but chooses not to investigate. We flash forward a day or two, and Winters returns to the tavern and meets Eccentric 2, who lures HIM out into the desert, though the bartender tries to warn him. a confrontation occurs, Winters shoots the villain, and returns to the tavern for a glass of wine.
Literally the exact same outline for every story! Now, by about story 10 or so, a NEW plot rears its head. Here, Winters is in the desert, tracking a criminal, when he runs into a stranger who knows his name. despite his fear, he Engages and gets drawn into witnessing a marvel, which turns deadly when his host begins to challenge him. This story (because, once again, despite its iterations, they're all the same story) has more dream logic and is outright supernatural.
I'm so disappointed in this collection. Lon Williams is a writer of some note of this era - though hears best known for his SciFi stories - and I was really looking forward to some good tales. And there IS some potential in the characters (Doc is fun, even if under developed. And Winters and his faithful steed Cannonball ARE enjoyable protagonists) and the setting. But it's just ... wasted. maybe if I was reading one of these a month in my favorite pulp, the flaws wouldn't be so obvious. But one right after another in a row like this? oh god, it's painful.
(and yes, I am totally waiting for someone who has read them all to respond to this and tell me the second half is amazing; meaning I'm gonna have to pick this up again. Lol!)
March 16, 2021
This was an interesting collection, in that, when I bought it, I did not expect it was going to be a series of stories based on one character and his exploits. A lesson to me to read the descriptions of potential purchases more closely! The first half dozen or so stories were so formula based that I got the feeling the author had a set outline, and merely plugged in different specifics to make each successive story different. Thankfully this lessened as I progressed through the collection, and by the end, each tale was quite novel and often engrossing. I felt the book was a glimpse of Lon Williams' development as an author, marking his improvement over the years these stories were written. Looking back, I am quite glad I persevered and finished the entire book, which was in doubt for awhile there due to the aforementioned repetitive formula of the early tales. Overall I would recommend this collection for lovers of pulp style weird western tales, even if they are all one series. The price point of .99 certainly makes it worth buying.
September 8, 2025
wonderful book
January 5, 2015
These stories are boring. I read the first four and couldn't take anymore. The plot is identically the same in each story. Only the names of the bad guys have been changed to protect the guilty. There is zero character development in the main character. There is nothing weird or fantastic about these stories. They are like bad gothic tales. A hint of ghosts and then it is all explained away. They aren't even spooky. I find it difficult to believe the author was able to sell even one of these. Robert E Howard's tales of two decades earlier are far better weird westerns. That he could is perhaps a reflection on the '50s and the dying days of the pulps.
July 9, 2015
Dissapointing
.all the stories seemed the same. As well as it repeats the appearance of both deputy and saloon owner over and over.
.all the stories seemed the same. As well as it repeats the appearance of both deputy and saloon owner over and over.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews