Welcome to Digestive Digest Vol. 7, where we ride straight into the Weird West and let the frontier chew on us a little. This time the saddlebags are stuffed with splatter and scripture, cursed railroads and Confederate bloodsuckers, cosmic cattle calls and haunted campfire theology. We are talking gut wagons and cursed lakes in Horror on the Range, slow-burn faith panic in The Country Under Heaven, righteous vampire-stomping in Southern Cross, and a demon-haunted locomotive in Black Rose. Think dust, dried blood, bad decisions, and monsters that feel way too at home under that big empty sky. Saddle up, keep a hand on your holy water and your whiskey, and let’s see what crawls out of the canyon.

Horror on the Range: Frontier Problems with Extra Guts

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.

Published December 12, 2025 by Undertaker Books.

The Country Under Heaven: Ovid Vesper’s Long, Slow, Faith-Based Panic Attack

Frederic S. Durbin is a veteran fantasy and horror writer whose earlier work leans wistful and mythic, the kind of soft focus weird that could sit on a mainstream shelf without scaring the shit out of anybody. Here he heads out to the Weird West with a fix up of previously published tales and new material, stitching them into the life story of Ovid Vesper, a Civil War vet who can see things that should not be walking under God’s sky. It feels like Durbin trying to graft his lyrical, old school sensibility onto a bloodier, tentacled frontier.

Ovid rides from Missouri to Texas to New Mexico and beyond, crossing paths with a creepy “Fate Machine,” a maybe angelic, maybe demonic shadow figure called the Craither, and various haunted towns, hungry hills, and tentacled things under the plains. He wants something simple, really: a life that is not full of war and horror. What he keeps getting is fresh supernatural bullshit testing his faith and his nerves.

What I really dug here were the set pieces. The cornfield revival around the typewriter seance, the showdown with a child murderer out by the creek, the bur oak corpse flensed by something inhuman, the quiet Illinois finale with a haunted olive tree. When the book locks into one of those scenes, it works. You feel the dust in your teeth and the cold little hand of the Craither on your neck.

The problem is everything in between. The prose is careful and often pretty, but it rambles. Ovid’s voice is part frontier memoir, part Sunday school lesson, and the result is a lot of talk where you want the story to shut up and ride. The cosmic threat is vague, the theology chatty, and the episodic structure means tension resets every chapter. You keep waiting for all this shit to crescendo, and instead it sort of politely peters out.

Themes include faith, guilt, and how slaughter, human or otherwise, stains the land. Horror is the spiritual hangover of war and manifest destiny. It’s ultimately bittersweet and oddly gentle, more melancholy campfire story than full on nightmare.

Contextually, this sits as a respectable but minor entry in both Weird West and Durbin’s catalog, closer to a mood piece than a genre benchmark. Solid enough craft and a few really fucked up images, but too baggy and polite to stick in the brainpan for long.

Published May 13, 2025 by Melville House.

Southern Cross: Confederate Vampires Can Eat Stakes And Die Mad About It

Vaughn A. Jackson has mostly been a creature and cosmic horror guy, swinging between kaiju epics and eldritch nastiness, and Southern Cross feels like him rolling up his sleeves and saying, “Fine, let’s do the vampire Western that actually hates the Confederacy.” It is the first Ballad of the Blackthornes book and plays very much like an origin season for a franchise monster hunter.

Our POV is Ezekiel Blackthorne, a formerly enslaved Black Union scout turned vampire killer, stomping his way across Civil War Louisiana to find the wife and daughter stolen from him by the old bloodsucker Palaiologos. Along the way he picks up Will, an idealistic Union kid, and eventually a small party of misfits as they chew through Confederate vamps toward a showdown at a creepy island castle in Vermilion Bay. Stakes are simple and clean. Save Anna Marie and Maya, kill the ancient bastard, maybe live long enough to enjoy five fucking minutes of peace.

The cross-shaped burn scars Ezekiel has carved into his skin so he can weaponize faith against vampires is metal as shit, and the flashback to the plantation massacre is straight up nightmare fuel. Confederate officers as literal parasites is such an obvious metaphor it should feel corny, but Jackson leans in hard and it mostly works.

As you can imagine from the premise, this is pulpy and talky, all quips and gunfights and blood. The prose is clear and fast, with a few killer lines, but the middle stretch turns into a bit of a “and then our party rides to the next fucked up town” loop. Some scenes of trauma or politics get rushed so we can hurry to the next cool monster kill, which keeps the book fun but stops it from hitting as deep as it could.

The big themes are vengeance, chosen family, and the ugly overlap between human evil and supernatural evil. The conclusion (without spoiling things) is brutal in a good way, and the epilogue gives the whole thing a lingering “the fight keeps going” ache.

This is a crowd pleasing, politically pissed off Weird West that feels more like a bloody pilot episode than a fully leveled up masterpiece. A fast, fun, foul mouthed vampire shootout that absolutely works, but you can feel the even better shit this series is still building toward.

Published March 20, 2025 by Falstaff Books.

Black Rose: God, Guns, And A Fucking Haunted Locomotive

Arlo Z. Graves and Graveside Press feel like they are planting a big weird flag in the Weird West with this one. He has been circling horror and dark fantasy for a bit, but Black Rose reads like a statement book, the first time all his obsessions with haunted machinery, faith, and gunslingers finally click into something that actually smacks you in the face. This is not a dry debut experiment, it feels like a fuck you, here is my world, deal with it.

Geist Warden Gabriel Valasquez is an aging holy gunfighter who can taste silver and carries a stable of borderline sentient guns. A Fading kid dies on his train and mutters about the Wraith of Rhyolite, which shoves Gabriel toward a ghost town where an Awakened locomotive called Bucephalus and the legendary demon revolver Black Rose are tightening a noose around the frontier. He wants redemption and a clean conscience. What he gets is a machine haunted hellscape that keeps throwing more shit at him, from soul sick telegraph lines to feral engine gods.

The cosmology here is a lot of fun. The Awakened trains feel like industrial kaiju, stomping around on tracks and sucking people dry. The Fading disease is part plague, part spiritual foreclosure. The Black Rose herself is a proper horror icon, a gun that whispers names and promises power, and when she finally sings on the page it feels fucking earned. The train graveyard in Goldfield, the opening scene with the infected boy on the railcar, those sequences genuinely hit.

Graves writes in dense, sensory paragraphs, full of rust, coal smoke, and weird little theological asides. It is pulpy but not dumb, ornate without disappearing up its own ass. The pacing wobbles in the middle, with a bit too much lore talk and not quite enough people getting their shit wrecked, but the book rallies hard for a big, bloody, emotional payoff.

Underneath the monsters, this is about what progress costs and how faith gets twisted into a weapon and a product. Gabriel keeps burning himself down in the name of justice, and the horror keeps asking how much of that is sacrifice and how much is addiction. It’s all a bit melancholic and grimy, like stepping off a midnight train with coal dust in your lungs and realizing the whole system is haunted.

Big swing Weird West horror that stumbles a little, but lands enough shots that I would happily ride this fucked up train again.

Published February 7, 2025 by Graveside Press.