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Horror on the Range: A Western Horror Anthology
Saddle up to take on the weird west in the Horror on the Range anthology!
Headlined by tales from Undertaker Books’ resident Western yarn-spinners, D.L. Winchester and C.M. Saunders, this anthology will bring new adventures from Aggie and Dylan Decker!
But that’s not all!
Eleven other scribes join the fun, taking you on a horrific adventure all over tarnation and back again, facing varmints both human and monstrous. Zombies? Offal Monsters? Rattlesnakes? They’re all within these pages, along with so much more!
These ain’t your grandpa’s campfire tales…
They’re better!
Headlined by tales from Undertaker Books’ resident Western yarn-spinners, D.L. Winchester and C.M. Saunders, this anthology will bring new adventures from Aggie and Dylan Decker!
But that’s not all!
Eleven other scribes join the fun, taking you on a horrific adventure all over tarnation and back again, facing varmints both human and monstrous. Zombies? Offal Monsters? Rattlesnakes? They’re all within these pages, along with so much more!
These ain’t your grandpa’s campfire tales…
They’re better!
202 pages, Kindle Edition
Published December 12, 2025
1 person is currently reading
7 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 16, 2025
It's been a while since my last western horror read, and I hadn't realized how much I'd missed a good western horror story till I started reading this anthology! From the get go, I was travelling deeply into 5-stars territory: the writing was excellent, the characters strong and perfectly fleshed out, the dialogue and the setting gritty and compelling, the evil encountered palpable and occasionally quite disturbing. My only complaint would be the lack of variety: why so many vampires? And just one skinwalker tale? Fortunately, the stories are all top-notch, very different from each other, at times emotionally heavy, and well worth the investment.
I had a lot of favorites, and picking just a few to mention was not at all easy. I was hugely impressed by the opening story, Chloe York's "The Gut Wagoner," a horrifying tale of one widow's survival among men, filled with stunning imagery; in fact, the gory visuals were among the best I've ever seen, reminiscent of some well-known Clive Barker stories. Desiree Horton's "Bad Water" was a true gem, a creepy and unsettling story of another widow, this one travelling on the emigrant trail with her irritating brother-in-law, and stumbling upon a cursed place she'd been warned about. "Noose Creek" by D.L. Winchester is a new Aggie & Roche tale, heartfelt and entertaining as always. C.M.Saunders' "Midnight at Deadwood Station" is a Dylan Decker story, a supernatural take on second chances. "Dead Reckoning" by Deborah Tapper was a wonderful revenge story of one man dying and coming back till he's gotten the payback he desires. Finally, "A Fist Full of Dirt" by E.M. Otero - yikes, this one had worms! A really good story of a heist gone wrong, with some memorable scenes of body horror.
All in all, a western horror anthology brimming with weirdness, bleak endings, and amazing rides into the bizarre, the gory, and the uncanny! Highly recommend!
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
I had a lot of favorites, and picking just a few to mention was not at all easy. I was hugely impressed by the opening story, Chloe York's "The Gut Wagoner," a horrifying tale of one widow's survival among men, filled with stunning imagery; in fact, the gory visuals were among the best I've ever seen, reminiscent of some well-known Clive Barker stories. Desiree Horton's "Bad Water" was a true gem, a creepy and unsettling story of another widow, this one travelling on the emigrant trail with her irritating brother-in-law, and stumbling upon a cursed place she'd been warned about. "Noose Creek" by D.L. Winchester is a new Aggie & Roche tale, heartfelt and entertaining as always. C.M.Saunders' "Midnight at Deadwood Station" is a Dylan Decker story, a supernatural take on second chances. "Dead Reckoning" by Deborah Tapper was a wonderful revenge story of one man dying and coming back till he's gotten the payback he desires. Finally, "A Fist Full of Dirt" by E.M. Otero - yikes, this one had worms! A really good story of a heist gone wrong, with some memorable scenes of body horror.
All in all, a western horror anthology brimming with weirdness, bleak endings, and amazing rides into the bizarre, the gory, and the uncanny! Highly recommend!
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.
December 17, 2025
BWAF Score: 6/10
Undertaker Books leans hard into western horror here, channeling Winchester’s ex-mortician day job and love of the weird frontier into a line-up of 11 stories chosen from 200+ submissions. It feels like a mission statement for this little press: bloody, earnest, and a bit shaggy around the edges.
A rotating crew of outlaws, widows, ranch hands, snake-bit brides, and unlucky travelers keep wandering into a West that is absolutely fucking done with them. Guts in an impossible ravine wake up to defend their favorite wagoner, a cursed lake eats emigrants, vampires hide behind the undertaker’s smile, saguaros stalk the desert, and a rattlesnake decides which men get to live and which get their shit wrecked.
The horror of this anthology is very physical. York’s opener “The Gut Wagoner” is pure tactile obsession, turning offal into a kind of queer, meat-god transcendence. Horton’s “Bad Water” makes drowning feel seductively inevitable. Winchester’s own “Noose Creek” and Milder’s “Desmodus” twist classic vampire lore into something dustier and meaner, while “Saguaro Madness” and “The Rattler’s Bride” lean into hallucinatory desert weirdness and righteous female rage.
The prose sits mostly in that clean, competent lane. You get flashes of really sharp shit – York’s sensory overload, Taylor’s heat-stroke religious fury, Picco’s folkloric creep – alongside a few stories that read like solid Tales From The Crypt episodes rather than bangers you’ll be quoting for years. Pacing is brisk; nobody overstays their welcome, but a couple pieces feel like they hit credits one scene too early.
The book keeps circling power and exploitation: bodies used up by men, by capital, by the land itself, and then taking grisly revenge. It’ll leave a grim little grin on your face, like finishing a bottle of cheap whiskey after a long shitty day and watching the sunset bleed out over the desert.
A good sampler of modern western horror that will not redefine the subgenre but absolutely belongs in the year’s conversation for fans of indie Weird West. A fun, bloody saddlebag of stories with some standout fuck-yeah moments, just not quite consistent enough to ride into the hall of fame.
Read if you love short, punchy stories more than slow, literary epics.
Skip if you need ultra-polished prose and big “important” themes every time.
Undertaker Books leans hard into western horror here, channeling Winchester’s ex-mortician day job and love of the weird frontier into a line-up of 11 stories chosen from 200+ submissions. It feels like a mission statement for this little press: bloody, earnest, and a bit shaggy around the edges.
A rotating crew of outlaws, widows, ranch hands, snake-bit brides, and unlucky travelers keep wandering into a West that is absolutely fucking done with them. Guts in an impossible ravine wake up to defend their favorite wagoner, a cursed lake eats emigrants, vampires hide behind the undertaker’s smile, saguaros stalk the desert, and a rattlesnake decides which men get to live and which get their shit wrecked.
The horror of this anthology is very physical. York’s opener “The Gut Wagoner” is pure tactile obsession, turning offal into a kind of queer, meat-god transcendence. Horton’s “Bad Water” makes drowning feel seductively inevitable. Winchester’s own “Noose Creek” and Milder’s “Desmodus” twist classic vampire lore into something dustier and meaner, while “Saguaro Madness” and “The Rattler’s Bride” lean into hallucinatory desert weirdness and righteous female rage.
The prose sits mostly in that clean, competent lane. You get flashes of really sharp shit – York’s sensory overload, Taylor’s heat-stroke religious fury, Picco’s folkloric creep – alongside a few stories that read like solid Tales From The Crypt episodes rather than bangers you’ll be quoting for years. Pacing is brisk; nobody overstays their welcome, but a couple pieces feel like they hit credits one scene too early.
The book keeps circling power and exploitation: bodies used up by men, by capital, by the land itself, and then taking grisly revenge. It’ll leave a grim little grin on your face, like finishing a bottle of cheap whiskey after a long shitty day and watching the sunset bleed out over the desert.
A good sampler of modern western horror that will not redefine the subgenre but absolutely belongs in the year’s conversation for fans of indie Weird West. A fun, bloody saddlebag of stories with some standout fuck-yeah moments, just not quite consistent enough to ride into the hall of fame.
Read if you love short, punchy stories more than slow, literary epics.
Skip if you need ultra-polished prose and big “important” themes every time.
December 28, 2025
Okay so overtime I have realized I like western horror, huge shock to me, because I do not like westerns lol
So a western anthology has me curious but lucky me, I get to check it out early!
This is a short one so not going to spoil too much for you but wow. Sometimes I think well, all stories are the same in a sub category, like oh I’ve seen it all when it comes to possession etc, but found out quickly how different these things can be.
Not going to lie one of my favorites was Chloe, who is becoming an auto grab for me when I see her name pop up, I can’t wait to see more .
The Gut Wagoner, it had me a bit sick and a lot horrified but also like, lets gooooo, a woman’s claw to survival among a bunch of men? Perfection by the time it was done, but the road to it was paved in blood and gore in the best way possible.
My second pick is probably Bad Water by Desiree Horton, it’s about a woman ( theme for me? Maybe) that is “on the trail” with her brother in law ( I didn’t even start the story before I also knew he was annoying as hell ) but add in stumbling onto some maybe not so great land that could or could not be haunted and cursed, is a big recipe for disaster, I was hoping from the start that BIL got ate by something in this story lol )
There were so so many more in this that I could go on about but with short stories, I dont want to give away all the goodies, so check this out.
So a western anthology has me curious but lucky me, I get to check it out early!
This is a short one so not going to spoil too much for you but wow. Sometimes I think well, all stories are the same in a sub category, like oh I’ve seen it all when it comes to possession etc, but found out quickly how different these things can be.
Not going to lie one of my favorites was Chloe, who is becoming an auto grab for me when I see her name pop up, I can’t wait to see more .
The Gut Wagoner, it had me a bit sick and a lot horrified but also like, lets gooooo, a woman’s claw to survival among a bunch of men? Perfection by the time it was done, but the road to it was paved in blood and gore in the best way possible.
My second pick is probably Bad Water by Desiree Horton, it’s about a woman ( theme for me? Maybe) that is “on the trail” with her brother in law ( I didn’t even start the story before I also knew he was annoying as hell ) but add in stumbling onto some maybe not so great land that could or could not be haunted and cursed, is a big recipe for disaster, I was hoping from the start that BIL got ate by something in this story lol )
There were so so many more in this that I could go on about but with short stories, I dont want to give away all the goodies, so check this out.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews