G. W. Thomas returns from Strange Detectives to bring you more tales of brave heroes who face off against the darkness. You will meet former Deputy Brett Hope who finds terror in the Old West. Zombies, vampires even a woman created by magic. Hope deals with them with a six shooter and a knowledge that not is all that it seems. Also you will experience a tale of the Swiss Alps and a race of killer apes, and another of Labrador and fearless trappers who face off against a most famous enemy. And lastly, we go to modern times and Western Canada, where Sandochis and the Athenodorians face evil of a most unusual kind. G. W. Thomas writes like the Pulpsters of old, with action, color and strange ideas.
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From the Afterword: When I write a tale of this sort the setting often suggests what kinds of horrors might lie out there for brave men and women to find. You wouldn’t expect yetis or sasquatches in downtown London, though it would be intriguing to find a way to fill the city’s famous sewer system with such. (The creators of Doctor Who might disagree.) You are more likely to encounter such creatures on top of mountains or in deep, dripping coastal forests. Sometimes it is fun to play around with expectations, while other times logic prevails. Sometimes it a simple word that gives you the idea and demands the setting such as the word “Heller”. In Cowboy lingo that means a bad man, usually with a gun, like in Louis L’Amour’s The Heller With a Gun (1955). To a Horror/Fantasy writer that screams for a different interpretation.
That story is a Weird Western, of course. As you will find with all these tales, the stories are all Horror tales (or more specifically “Monster” tales) but they are also true to their other genres as well. My Westerns are Thrilling Westerns, just as my Pulp-style Adventure stories could have been in Adventure. Horror as a genre is not dependent on setting. You can write a Horror story set anywhere. A nursery, a tax accountant’s office, even in outer space. It can happen anywhere, which is half the fun, of course. For this collection of tales, it is the Southwest of America, the snowy climes of Labrador, even the interior desert of British Columbia.
Contents
PROLOGUE I
HELLER
LAOCOON
SILENCE
WEEP THE DUST
PROLOGUE II
THE BLACK WOLF
PROLOGUE III
UNGEHEURERHORN
PROLOGUE IV
MOTHER OF HYDRA
OPEN BOOK
EPILOGUE
AFTERWORD
This book is in a way a companion to Strange Detectives. Both books have a framing device, plenty of detectives and monsters. The Athenodorians show up in both books as well. In Strange Detectives they are busy in the 1920s. In Strange Adventures, those occult detectives are still at it in the present day. (They showed up in one story in The Book of the Black Sun II: The Book Collector as well.) The biggest difference between the two volumes is there is more “adventure” in this second volume. My Weird Western hero, Brett Hope, has four tales here. He will be seen again soon in our upcoming anthology, Devil’s Gulch.
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