I have written before that I enjoy a good weird western story. I have looked at some anthologies of that genre here over the years.

Joe R. Lansdale has been considered as the resuscitator of the weird western story after it was missing in action for fifty years. Two works in the 1980s brought the genre back: The Magic Wagon (Bantam Books, 1986) and “Dead in the West.”

“Dead in the West” was a four part serial in Eldritch Tales from 1984-87. Space & Time printed it as a booklet in 1986. Night Shade Books did a hardback in 2005. Lansdale had written other stories featuring Reverend Jedidiah Mercer since then. All were collected in the book Deadman’s Road (Subterranean Press, 2010) in hardback and then in trade paperback by Tachyon Press in 2013.

I read the original serialized version of “Dead in the West” in Eldritch Tales thirty years ago. I reread it very recently in the trade paperback version of Deadman’s Road.

Reverend Jedidiah Mercer arrives in the town of Mud Creek, Texas. Things get strange with a missing stage, disappearing people, and the dead coming to life. He is a pistol toting and mentally tortured individual. There is a zombie outbreak from an Indian’s curse. The story is apocalyptic at the end. The original version is pulpy in presentation. Lansdale states in the introduction that he went back and rewrote the story quite a bit. Lansdale’s prose style was not as idiosyncratic as his later scatological prose.

“The Gentleman’s Hotel” first appearance was in the collection The Shadows, Kith and Kin from 2007. Mercer finds a deserted small town with a werewolf problem. There are seven werewolves left loose from their graves when some drunken cowboys removed the oak stakes in the graves.

“The Crawling Sky” was in Son of Retro-Pulp Tales. I had to have read it in The Book of Cthulhu but don’t remember reading it. A cabin is haunted by an other-dimensional creature brought by one of those forbidden tomes frequent in Lovecraftian fiction.

“The Dark Down There” is original to the collection. A race or species of evil dwarves, technically kobolds are terrorizing a mining camp.

There is one Rev. Mercer story, “The Red Headed Dead” that is not in this collection. It is in the anthology Dead Hand’s Man and I remember liking it.

Lansdale knows Texas of course. He has some knowledge of firearms. Rev. Mercer carries a .36 “Navy” Colt pistol converted from ball & cap to metal cartridges. He pays attention to the care of horses. Mercer is always tending to his horse including combing it at the end of the day. He knows how to write action scenes. But, his prose is scatological. Words like snot, booger, fart, fart catcher and worse are used. It is all part of the Lansdale brand. I like Joe Lansdale personally. I had a nice talk with him at Pulpfest in 2018. So, beware if you are new to Joe R. Lansdale.