100 Books Like The Weird Wild West

Orphaned young, Ming Tsu is the son of Chinese immigrants but was raised by a ruthless gang of outlaws during the California Gold Rush. When, as an adult, his wife is kidnapped, Ming Tsu goes on a quest for revenge that pits him against some of the same men from his youth. And this is happening at the same time a bitter fury rages across the nation at the Chinese men brought into the US during westward expansion.

Lin's book is gritty and propulsive, and Ming Tsu is an ass-kicker on par with any cowboy John Wayne ever played. 

This short novel is heaps of fun! It’s another take on the Tombstone story, told from Doc Holliday’s point of view with great wry wit. This Doc is an engaging and unexpectedly kind character, with little or no hint of his reputed “mean disposition”. Weird elements include steampunk – with Thomas Edison living in Tombstone and bringing not only electric light but cyborg sex workers – as well as an undead Johnny Ringo, and supernatural justice wielded by the Native American shamans. It’s delightful!

This rollicking set of whip-smart short stories through a supernatural Wild West is guaranteed to engage readers, with tales ranging from uncannily magical cards to steampunk bordellos to undead outlaws.

Delivering chaotic gunslinger fun from start to finish, Dead Man's Hand explores the intersecting worlds of the living and undead in many delightful and unforeseen ways. As a supernatural storyteller myself, I couldn't stop turning the pages to see what new fantastical creature or magical spell the authors would envision next.

It was my faithful companion through many late nights crafting my own novel, inspiring me with its spirited inventiveness of mysterious beings and magical mayhem. 

These fourteen essays explore the hybrid “weird west” genre, examining a range of texts including some by Native American authors, as well as TV series, films, fiction, roleplaying games, and comic books. It makes for an interesting read – and is thought-provoking in its conclusion that despite weird westerns challenging and destabilizing many of the old cliches, they have yet to “imagine an existence outside of colonial frameworks”. This has given me much food for thought, as it seems to me that frontiers (wherever found) are an intrinsic part of the western genre, and frontiers tend to imply conflict between the inhabitants and the invaders, between the new and the established. Maybe I’m wrong! In any case, this proves that we still have a long way to go before we’re done exploring all the possibilities of this intriguing genre! 

Elmore Leonard wrote a ton of books, and almost all of them were darn good. He’s most famous for his more modern books, Get Shorty, etc. His stories are raw, edgy, and exciting. Toward the very end of his career, he did crank out some novels that were, I thought, junk. But for the most part, his writing is terrific, easy to read, page-turning books. What many don’t know is that when he was young, he was writing Westerns. And wow, what fabulous Westerns, too! If you’re lucky enough to get a copy of this collection, you’ll both love it, and feel kind of bad when you get to the end. One of the very best Western writers of them all.

Was the West of the late 1800s truly as violent as we imagine? And if it was, why was it that people were shooting each other on the streets?

Richard Brown’s book provides decisive answers to these questions. Yes, some corners of the West were strikingly bloody. But what spurred this violence wasn’t just personal feuds or poker table rivalries. It was particularly politics that drove the rash of gunfighting in this unsettled era.

Did you know that “Wild Bill” Hickok was a diehard Republican and that most of the people he shot were Democrats? Or, that Jesse James was a lifelong Democrat who usually robbed Republicans? When we forget the political realities of the West, we flatten the past–but Brown’s book provides an antidote to this.

Slogum House is a fairly brutal account of the dynamics between a gentle patriarch who married a shifty woman and the influence her brutality had on the family. Parts of this novel are disturbing and hard to read, but this is an interesting tale of a desperate and driven woman who will literally stop at nothing to get what she wants, and how that ruthlessness colors her family and children’s lives. The setting is the remote western sand-hills of Nebraska. Brilliant writing.

The public was introduced to Wyatt Earp’s story by Walter Noble Burns and Stuart Lake around 1930, but the novelistic liberties taken by these two writers produced two books of fantasy. Other writers who reacted to this fiction swung to the other end of the spectrum and wrote damning indictments against Wyatt Earp. Tefertiller gives us the facts and leaves it to the reader to parse Wyatt Earp, the man.

I have visited many Sonoran Desert sites with Mr. Tefertiller, places where events in the Earp saga took place. There, we engaged in conversations and batted around ideas. I judge him to be a most reliable and dedicated researcher/writer.

Bob Fudge worked for the famous XIT, a large cattle outfit based in the Texas Panhandle, during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Bob Fudge lived an iconic cowboy life, driving cattle from Texas to Montana. He told his life story in 1932, a year before his death. I first heard about this rare book during a song intro, by western singer Ian Tyson on his Live At Longview album. Before he plays the song “Bob Fudge,” Tyson tells a story of how someone left this book on his guitar case during an earlier performance—and it captivated him. The book captivated me, too, and served as inspiration for my own western novels. Another Canadian western singer, Colter Wall, recorded a live cover version (watch it on YouTube) that is quite cool.

The Broken Gun has one of the tightest plots of any of the many Western novels from the late, great Louis L’Amour. L’Amour’s Westerns are almost all set in the mid-1800s. His good guys are good, and his bad guys bad. His books are all fun, easy to read, full of action, and keep you turning the pages. Some readers think Louis L’Amour was a 2nd rate writer…but he knew what he was doing & literally millions of folks have loved his books. Many, like myself, have read all of his Westerns, some of them several times. When I go camping I always toss in a few of his paperbacks. When it’s too windy to fish, I kick back and re-read a Louis L’Amour Western. Always fun.