Frontiers of Fright book drop
And, Happy Halloween!
I’m excited and flattered to be included in this murderer’s row of fine horror writers. The Denver Horror Collective is releasing its fourth anthology: Frontiers of Fright, edited by A.E. Fontana.
You can pre-order the book here.
I wrote my story in the anthology, Windbaby, after rereading Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove (the third time I’ve read it). For those of you unfamiliar with the book, McMurtry was attempting to strip the myth out of the American Western, and accidently ended up creating one of the more enduring celebrations of the myth of the cowboy and the American West. Regardless, it’s a great book, partly because of the tension between the myth-building and the real-world history.
A takeaway from the book (as well as a great non-fiction companion read, Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time), and one that made it’s way into my story, is how empty we made that land, and how quickly it happened. In the 1870s, the American Southwest held eight million bison. Twenty years later: only five hundred. Similarly, the American Indian population of North America was at one time five and fifteen million. By the late 1800s that number had fallen to under 250,000.
The vison of enormous cattle drives conjured by the romanticized history of the American West (like Lonesome Dove) only existed for about 20 years. Trains and advances in refrigeration rendered them unnecessary.
With bison slaughtered, and Indians slaughtered and herded into reservations, what was left was a vast empty space, devoid of life and culture and history. When the bison and Indians were gone (and the cattle drives mostly a myth), all that was left were the empty fields of tenacious prairie grasses, and even those grasses fell victim to post-World War II wheat prices and rapacious capitalism, leading to the devastation of the Dust Bowl years.
In my story, I write what it must have been like to live in the middle of that great soulless expanse. Humanity, decency, and ultimately even words are lost to the dead swaths of emptied land.
The official roll-out of the book is on Sunday, Nov 2nd, from 2 to 4 pm Mountain time. You can join on the event day and time here. Join Denver Horror Collective as we celebrate our fourth anthology, Frontiers of Fright: A Southwestern Horror Anthology, with our editor, A.E. Santana, and our participating authors for a fun and spooky afternoon introducing the stories of Frontiers of Fright to our fans. There’ll be author readings, a Q&A, and a chance to win books and swag.
Hope to see you there.
Peace.