Spud Flynn comes of a race of kings, as he’d tell you himself. The earliest example of Western fantasy I’ve read-and it’s a daisy, let me tell you-is Oliver La Farge’s “Spud and Cochise,” collected in 1935 in his A Pause in the Desert. I’ll bet that in some tattered volume with a lurid engraving for cover art, Kit Carson or Buffalo Bill or another based-on-real-life fictional hero survived a haunted mine, fought a prehistoric monster, or discovered a lost city. The Weird West as a subgenre probably goes back to the earliest days of the Western: to the dime novels and serial stories in weekly gazettes that turned the American west into a mythic land even before it stopped being a place you could move to, before it became the Old West. In those episodes, I knew there would be some science-fictional threat in play: a killer automaton, a fire-breathing mechanical juggernaut, an earthquake-generating engine.Īfter a story like that, it was hard to get worked up about the next episode of Bonanza. government, or at least agents West and Gordon. Miguelito Loveless, played by Michael Dunn, plotted the downfall of the U.S.

I enjoyed all the episodes, of course (they have their own train car! And James West rides a swell black horse! And his fights are way cooler than the ones on Gunsmoke! And OMG those pants are tight!), but my favorites were the ones in which Dr. Readers will think about the story long after it ends, savoring the writing and imagining what the characters might do next.Have I mentioned that television made me what I am today? At age eleven I started watching The Wild, Wild West, starring Robert Conrad and Ross Martin, and I’d say it was a contributing factor. The magic is less flashy than in many fantasy novels, but it’s vivid and deeply felt. Mixing fantasy with Old West lore is risky, but Bull takes time to make the place and the people real before undeniably supernatural forces appear. When tough-minded widow Mildred Benjamin and drifter Jesse Fox realize that dark magic is manipulating people for a sorcerer’s selfish ends, they must decide what they can and should do about it, in the process discovering who they truly are. Bull approaches the story from a different angle, considering matters that may or may not have escaped Wyatt’s chilly attention. The taming of Tombstone, Ariz., by Wyatt Earp, his brothers and their pal Doc Holliday is a cherished American myth of stoic heroism. ) takes huge chances and achieves something distinctively wonderful with this subtle reworking of a western legend. World Fantasy–finalist Bull ( War for the Oaks

Territory by emma bull