Undead in the West II : they just keep coming

387 Pages·2013·9.37 MB·English

by  Cynthia J. Miller

Undead in the West II
They Just Keep Coming
Edited by
Cynthia J. Miller
A. Bowdoin Van Riper
THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC.
Lanham • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
2013
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Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2013 by Scarecrow Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Undead in the West II : they just keep coming / edited by Cynthia J. Miller, and
A. Bowdoin Van Riper.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-8108-9264-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-9265-1 (ebook)
1. Western films—United States. 2. Horror films—United States. 3. American
literature—West (U.S.)—History and criticism. 4. Western television programs—
United States. 5. Horror television programs—United States. 6. Television programs—
Social aspects—United States. 7. Popular culture—United States. I. Miller, Cynthia J.,
1958- editor of compilation. II. Van Riper, A. Bowdoin editor of compilation. III. Title:
Undead in the West two. IV. Title: Undead in the West 2.
PN1995.9.W4U5315 2013
791.43'6278—dc23 2013021030
™
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America.
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To all those
whose imaginations are captured
by vast deserts and big skies
for whom the howl of a coyote signals
that something evil this way comes
who know that the Western frontier
has an adventure or two left to offer
and who believe that graveyards
aren’t always the end of the trail
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. . . and the very earth, in which the dead body of Lazarus was lodged,
presently turned him out alive.
—The Gospel of Nicodemus XV:18
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Contents
Foreword: In the Beginning—Frederick Faust’s
Western Fantasies ix
William F. Nolan
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction xvii
Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Part I: Pioneers on a Wide-Open Frontier
Chapter 1 V aqueros and Vampires in the Pulps:
Robert E. Howard and the Dawn of the Undead West 3
Jeffrey Shanks and Mark Finn
Chapter 2 W eird Western Comic Books of the 1950s 26
Paul Green
Chapter 3 F illing Up the West with Dead Folks:
Joe R. Lansdale 45
Cynthia J. Miller
Chapter 4 O n Death’s Horizon: Wandering Spirits and
Otherworldly Landscapes in Western Art and Cinema 63
Courtney Fellion
v
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vi w Contents
Part II: Lawmen and Gunmen in the Badlands
Chapter 5 G enre Exchange on the Supernatural Frontier in
Stephen King’s The Gunslinger: The Gunfighter
Archetype Meets the Ravenous Other 87
Adam S. Kozaczka
Chapter 6 V ampires and Vermin: The Ambivalence of
Historical and Generic Revision of the West(ern)
in Darkwatch 106
Christina V. Cedillo
Chapter 7 F inding a Noble Purpose in the Postapocalyptic
Zombie West: Identity Development in Jonathan
Maberry’s Rot and Ruin 124
Julia Saric
Chapter 8 A llegorical Confrontation Meets Gaming System:
Rhetoric and Trauma within Red Dead Redemption /
Undead Nightmare 142
M. Melissa Elston
Chapter 9 G o West, Young Fang! Skinner Sweet as Outlaw
and American Vampire 159
Andrew John Sneddon and Aspasia Stephanou
Part III: Men of God on Hallowed Ground
Chapter 10 A Baptism of Blood: Priest and the Regeneration
of Violence on Min-Woo Hyung’s Frontier 177
William Grady
Chapter 11 G hosts of Texas: The Duke, the Vampire, and the
Saint of Killers in Preacher 195
Jim Casey and Marc Petersen
Chapter 12 “ And Hell Followed with Him”: Gothic Economics
in Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider (1985) 214
John Edgar Browning
Chapter 13 S cratching Open Old Wounds: The Supernatural
Brujo and the Undead Body in The Missing and
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada 231
Jericho Williams
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Contents w vii
Part IV: Communities at the Edge of the Unknown
Chapter 14 D ays Gone Bye: Robert Kirkman’s Reenvisioned
Western The Walking Dead 249
Jeffrey A. Sartain
Chapter 15 G enre Mashing in the Role-Playing Game Deadlands:
The Weird West, the Horror Steampunk Western 269
Rachel Mizsei Ward
Chapter 16 U nsettled: Ghosts, Zombies, and Indians in the
American West 286
C. Richard King
Chapter 17 U ndead and Online: Fan Communities and the
Undead Western 305
Matthias Stork and A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Afterword 327
Paul O’Connor
Index 331
About the Contributors 351
About the Editors 357
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Foreword: In the Beginning—
Frederick Faust’s Western Fantasies
William F. Nolan
He was born Frederick Schiller Faust but was better known as “Max Brand,
King of the Pulps.” Under this famous pen name (one of at least twenty he
used in his fabulous career), Faust became one of the world’s most prolific
writers, his work filling the pages of twelve hundred pulp magazines, from Ar-
gosy to Western Story. In just twenty-seven years—from 1917 until his death,
from a shrapnel wound while serving as a war correspondent on the Italian
Front, in May 1944—he wrote the equivalent of about four hundred books,
some three hundred of which have been published to date.
Although he considered himself a working poet, with classical verse as his
primary passion, it was prose fiction that made his reputation. His son-in-law
Robert Easton noted, in a book-length study, that Faust was a contemporary
of Fitzgerald and Faulkner, Benet and Hemmingway, Wilder and Wolfe,
but “none of them performed on a more gigantic scale, and probably none
reached a larger audience.”1 Faust wrote in every popular genre (his creations
included the Dr. Kildare series), but it was as Max Brand that he earned his
place alongside Zane Grey as one of the two most celebrated Western novel-
ists of his period: “a genius” and “an artist,” in the words of one critic, who
“set standards of excellence which only infrequently would be reached again
in pulp magazine fiction.”2 Along the way, he brought the supernatural—and
the undead—to the fictional frontier.
Although he maintained an extensive file of Old West facts to bolster his
work, Faust always referred to his Western fictions as “fairy tales” and had a
ix
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