Lisa L Hannett lives in Adelaide, South Australia — city of churches, bizarre murders and pie floaters. Her short stories have been published in venues including Clarkesworld Magazine, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, ChiZine, Midnight Echo, Shimmer, Electric Velocipede, Tesseracts 14, and Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded, among other places. Her work has appeared on Locus’s Recommended Reading List 2009, Tangent Online’s Recommended Reading List 2010, and has been published in the Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2010. ‘The February Dragon’, co-authored with Angela Slatter, won the ‘Best Fantasy’ Aurealis Award in 2010. She is a graduate of Clarion South.
Her first collection, Bluegrass Symphony, was published by Ticonderoga Publications in 2011. Midnight and Moonshine, a second collection co-authored with Angela Slatter, will be published in 2012. You can find her online at lisahannett.com.
Thinking of the American mid-West conjures up images of cowboys and desperadoes, dusty plains and wild mountain ranges, Stetsons and sheriffs and shoot-outs. Usually, calling a story a ‘Western’ leads our imaginations back to the past: we visualise the O.K. Corral, the Alamo, and Billy the Kid. But call it a ‘Weird Western’ and this picture changes.
Weird West narratives shed the sepia tones we associate with shows like Deadwood, for instance, and take on darker hues. The struggle to survive on harsh frontier land goes beyond mere physical threat in these tales. It’s not just bandits, scorpions, or starvation that characters have to be wary of; it’s the gun-slinging sorcerers in Gemma Files’ Hexslinger series, who curse men with twisted Bible verses; it’s the Four Horses of the Apocalypse and zombie outbreaks in Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare; it’s confrontations with superstitions come to life, mythological creatures, and supernatural Others. These aren’t merely works of fantastical alternate history. In fact, it’s often difficult to pin these narratives down to a precise date or place. Like fairy tales, many Weird Westerns exist in a timeless otherland — one that is familiar because of a setting that relies on elements of horror and the bizarre — and these modern stories find their roots in Basil Tozer’s The Pioneers of Pike’s Peak or Ambrose Bierce’s The Stranger.
The reinvented mid-West in my book Bluegrass Symphony, a collection of twelve dark fantasy stories, is a territory riddled with dangers. People in the wilds of Alabaska, Two Squaw, Plantain, and Tapekwa Counties may not follow the law as we know it, but their towns are far from lawless. Justice and honour come from smoking guns — and nothing is missed by the mysterious Reverends’ eyes. This is a land of great magic, great risks. Shapeshifting is both a bootlegger’s skill and a twig-wife’s cruel punishment. Desperate deals are brokered between rough woodsmen and Minotaurs, Fae creatures and midwives, soul-smoking Mayors and Pegasus-riding delivery girls, Sheriffs and highwaymen — for safety, as well as selfishness. But as Ann VanderMeer points out in the book’s introduction, “These stories are about more than people just trying to get something from one another. These stories are about power and redemption, transformation, and sacrifice.” Everyone in the Weird West is the agent of their own fate — but in Bluegrass Symphony the line between defeat and salvation is often as thin as the soil under a wolfboy’s spurs.
[...] Thinking of the American mid-West conjures up images of cowboys and desperadoes, dusty plains and wild mountain ranges, Stetsons and sheriffs and shoot-outs. Usually, calling a story a ‘Western’ leads our imaginations back to the past: we visualise the O.K. Corral, the Alamo, and Billy the Kid. But call it a ‘Weird Western’ and this picture changes… Read the rest here. [...]