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 Horror/Scary: April 24, 2019 Issue [#9509] |
 This week: The Wild Weird West Edited by: Kate - Writing & Reading   More Newsletters By This Editor    1. About this Newsletter 2. A Word from our Sponsor 3. Letter from the Editor 4. Editor's Picks 5. A Word from Writing.Com 6. Ask & Answer 7. Removal instructions 
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Cowboys and gunfighters are iconic American heroes and using them as heroes in other genres is natural. Like tales of horror engaging terrifying beasts and otherworldly being, westerns use the themes of unknown wilderness and the survival of pioneers. Westerns also offer stories of struggles to maintain social order in a lawless environment - now can't you see yourself trying to corral a werewolf?
The western frontier was a vast unknown universe rife with myth and legend. Before the worldwide web and ipods, even before telegraph lines, news was carried overland by letter or oral retelling - and embellishment. The supernatural menaces of horror fiction are easy to inject into this setting, creating the horror western. The weird western uses both the supernatural elements and the western setting, maintaining the essential 'reality' of both. 
Consider inserting your characters from today into the historical 'old west' as did Rod Serling in several of his 'Twilight Zone' episodes. Perhaps your characters drive their 'mustang' across a 'no trespassing' sign to find a ranch, abandoned but for some wild mustangs that greet not the characters but the horse upon which they arrive. 
Consider the travelers in Stephen King's 'Dark Tower' series, returning to a western land that changes from year to year, morphing along with its inhabitants. Proving the western lands a natural place for writers of horror to camp for a spell and in the vast desert and prairies engage creatures both human and of other more esoteric ancestry and morphology.
The wild weird west also is a natural home for less easily classified genres including alternate history, speculative fiction and more fantastical elements of nature and science. And of course, engaging the unknown, there's ever a sense of presence, of being on edge, of your next step being over a cliff or through a crevasse and into a vast unknown populated by ... 
