GUNFIGHTER GOTHIC: BLOOD OF THE UNIVERSE is now available in paperback for $6.99 from Amazon! Or on the Kindle for $2.99.
GUNFIGHTER GOTHIC is my umbrella title for the supernatural western adventures of Hanna and Jill. Originally created for PulpWork Press’ HOW THE WEST WAS WEIRD, VOLUME 2, Hanna and Jill are now setting off on their own adventures.
Here’s the product description:
It’s 1866 and Jill (a white, merchant’s daughter) and Hanna (a Korean-American servant in the merchant’s house) have fled to the American West to start a new life on their own terms.
They boarded a train in Kansas City, and before the morning was over, they had fought werewolves and vampires, partnered with Bellingham, a time-traveling British secret agent, and made an enemy of Mrs. Lincoln.
And then the train jumped its tracks, crashing violently, and killing Jill.
Hanna is despondent until Bellingham reveals his real reason for being in 1866: the Universe Cutter, a knife with the power to resurrect the dead. All they have to do is find it.
To bring Jill back, Hanna will partner with two time travelers and President Grant’s right-hand man, and battle Confederates, werewolves, lizard men, sun worshipping cultists, and a man from the end of time. All for a chance to bring back the woman she loves … a woman who will never love her back.
GUNFIGHTER GOTHIC VOL. 0: BLOOD OF THE UNIVERSE also features the back-up tale, “Appetite for Appeasement,” starring Bellingham.
And here’s an excerpt from “Blood of the Universe”:
Flames ripped through the caboose. The train car was on its back and tilted at an obscure angle, putting one end ten feet higher than the other. Roof was floor and floor was roof. There had been a crash. The Morgan train had jumped its tracks almost two hours outside of Kansas City, headed west. Five bodies littered the roof-turned-floor, lying in a bed of low fire.
None of them moved for a very long time.
The caboose would have already surrendered itself and its occupants to the flame but for the presence of the heavy-set woman trapped beneath a sofa. Her name was Mary Todd Lincoln, widowed for just over a year, the price paid for an assassin’s bullet in her husband’s brain. The caboose was reinforced against Indian attack and train robbers, and so while the rest of the scattered train burned wildly outside in the plains in the early afternoon light, the caboose stubbornly held together.
The door at the higher end of the car was forced open and the influx of fresh oxygen caused the flames to rage anew. Five men dressed in red coats, black pants, and black bowler hats moved into the car.
“Sir!” one of the Haverton agents yelled in a British accent as he moved down the car, pointing at a man wearing a dark red duster who was lying face down on the floor. “Is he one of us? The pants are the same, but the jacket …?”
Winthrop, the barrel-chested senior officer among this group of private security agents, put his boot to the burning body and rolled the man onto his back, the tilt of the caboose threatening to. Flames had taken half the agent’s face, leaving a grotesque version of a once handsome man. The senior officer grunted roughly. “He’s above your pay grade. Leave the bastard.”
“But-!”
The officer pulled out a six shooter and put a bullet in the young agent’s head. “Did we forget we are not a democracy? Anyone else feel like questioning me today?” he roared to his men inside the burning car.
The remaining three Havertons said nothing else about the melted man in the maroon duster. Likewise, they ignored the Korean woman trapped beneath an overturned chair, an obviously dead white woman with a broken neck, and a small boy with half of his face blown off. Moving professionally and calmly despite the roaring flames, the men in red coats moved to the First Lady and dragged her body less-than-gently from the train, where they loaded her into a track-driven steam transport car. They headed east.
GUNFIGHTER GOTHIC: BLOOD OF THE UNIVERSE is now available in paperback for $6.99 from Amazon! Or on the Kindle for 99 cents.
