While I’m plugging away at my John Conquer novel and trying to sell this weird western wuxia book, I thought I’d pop in here and show you guys one of the pieces M. Wayne Miller did for the interior of the forthcoming Merkabah Rider: Have Glyphs Will Travel, which ought to be out in a month.
Here’s a look at the art for The Mules of The Mazzikim, which features Lilith and her boys come to pay The Rider a visit.
If you picked up the new edition of Merkabah Rider: High Planes Drifter, you may have seen the ad in the back for Ashe Armstrong’s A Demon In The Desert, a nifty weird western novel featuring a demon hunting orc named Grimluk.
Ashe is running a .99 cent sale on Amazon this month for the first of the now three book Grimluk series, A Demon In The Desert….
The Wastelands mining town of Greenreach Bluffs is deteriorating: with each passing day its inhabitants grow more fearful and paranoid, plagued by…something. They suffer nightmares and hallucinations, there are murders at the mine; the community is on the brink of madness and ruin and, as events escalate, realization dawns: the town has a demon problem. Two attempts at hunting it down fail, Greenreach Bluffs is at breaking point…and then Grimluk the Orc strides in out of the Wastes to answer their call for salvation.
Head over to books2read.com/ademoninthedesert to pick up a copy and get hooked.
Well like many people I’ve been playing a lot of Rockstar Games’ glorious, sure to be Game of The Year Red Dead Redemption 2….too much, really.
As an avid western film and history fan I’ve been thrilled by the amount of period detail in every nook and cranny, and having put in several hours gameplay, I’ve noticed quite a few visual callbacks to western movies – classics like The Wild Bunch and Outlaw Josey Wales, etc. I thought it might be fun to list some examples. A couple of these are pretty obscure, and could well be my own wishful thinking.
I’m only three chapters into the game, but these are some of the references I’ve noticed so far.
Every time I peel the hide off a rabbit I’m reminded of hapless Jeff Bridges in one of my favorite westerns, Bad Company.
Muddy Valentine sure reminds me of the sloppy streets of this Michael J. Pollard movie, Dirty Little Billy. Couldn’t find a good pic of the town itself, but the cast seems to wade in mud and horse shit.
With it’s unpainted, under construction buildings (and tyrannical Emerald Ranch boss), I was also reminded of the muddy town of Harmonville from Open Range, a movie that informs much of RDR2’s fashion sense as well.
Speaking of fashion, the custom legendary animal skin hats the trapper crafts are obviously a callback to Jeremiah Johnson.
Though the bear attacks are right out of The Revenant….
The unrepentant Rebels of The Outlaw Josey Wales and The Long Riders are somewhat akin to the Lemoyne Raiders that plague you around the town of Rhodes, though the latter movie’s preferred mode of dress seems to inspire the various bounty hunters and Pinkertons that come after you in the course of the game. Two Carradines from The Long Riders pictured here at what could very well be Clemens Point.
My Name Is Nobody sees Terrence Hill and Henry Fonda square off in the streets of New Orleans, obviously the reference for the town of Saint Denis.
The snowbound country of West Grizzly and extraterrestrial-plagued (look it up) Mount Shann reminded me instantly of the Corbucci classic The Great Silence, and it’s surely where the devs got their love of the broom handled Mauser pistol.
The town of Presbyterian Church from McCabe and Mrs. Miller seems to lend its look to the hilly town of Strawberry (is Strawberry a reference to Moebius’ seminal western comic Blueberry? I might be reaching there).
The assorted bumbling Klansmen one can encounter in the game are surely in part a reference to the idiotic (and flammable) proto-Klansmen depicted in Django Unchained.
I know I’ve seen that scarecrow riding around the wheat fields – I think near Emerald Ranch. Hard to distinguish this from actual game footage, but this shot is from Slow West with Michael Fassbender.
Finally (and this is just a bit of fun on my part), I doubt anybody at Rockstar has read my Merkabah Rider series,Merkabah Rider series, but it doesn’t stop me from using this engraving customization to mock up an approximation of the Rider’s Volcanic pistol.
What are some visual references you’ve noticed? I may amend this post as I progress through the game.
Merkabah Rider: High Planes Drifter is out now, revamped, with a new short story, brand new cover by Juri Umagami and interior art by M. Wayne Miller.
So how about a preview of M. Wayne Miller’s interior art for Merkabah Rider 2: The Mensch With No Name?
Here’s the illo for ‘The Infernal Napoleon.’
After a long hiatus, Merkabah Rider, the greatest weird western about a Hasidic gunslinger tracking the renegade teacher who betrayed his mystic Jewish order of astral travelers across the demon haunted Southwest of 1879 is back in print and Kindle on Amazon.
Featuring new interior illustrations by M. Wayne Miller and cover art by Juri Umagami.
“Ed Erdelac’s Merkabah Rider is equal parts Tolkien, Leone, and Lovecraft and yet manages to remain completely original, and that is quite an accomplishment. This is a FANTASTIC series. – Geof Darrow, Eisner Award winning creator of Shaolin Cowboy and Hard Boiled.
“The Rider is a fabulous character, in all senses of that word, and Erdelac’s a fabulous writer. High Planes Drifter contains all the demons, ancient gods, and gunplay a lover of weird westerns could want, but told from an angle no one else has touched before. Where else are you going to find a Jewish Doctor Strange packing heat in the old west? Nowhere, that’s where. This is crazily entertaining stuff.” – Daryl Gregory, award-winning author of Pandemonium and Spoonbenders
“Riding out of the Old West comes the Merkabah Rider, a Hasidic gunfighter who owes his provenance as much to the nasty inhabitants of Elmore Leonard’s westerns as he does his piousness to Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane. This highly original episodic series breathes new life into the overworked western with tight action, inglorious heroes, and unpredictable plots.” – Weston Ochse, award-winning author of SEAL Team 666 and Scarecrow Gods.
“I don’t have any hesitation in calling Merkabah Rider: High Planes Drifter the pinnacle of the Weird West genre, and one that will be hard to surplant.” -Sci Fi and Fantasy Reviewer
“Edward M. Erdelac’s Merkabah Rider: Tales Of A High Planes Drifter is without reservation one of the best Weird Westerns to roll into town in the last decade, if not the best.” – Cory Gross, Voyages Extraordinaires
It’s been HOW long since I posted here? Too long.
Well, here’s the cover art for the forthcoming re-release of my Merkbah Rider series – HIGH PLANES DRIFTER (yeah, I’m shortening the title a bit). The artist is Juri Umagami (whose Instagram is HERE).
Sharp-eyed fans will see this is a canny homage to the classic western that inspired the title, Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter.
Wait till you see what we have planned for next book, The Mensch With No Name. I’d spoil it, but I’d never FORGIVE myself….
This first re-release will feature an additional little seen Rider story, The Shomer Express, and interior art by M. Wayne Miller who did the covers for my novel Terovolas and my collection Angler In Darkness.
Coming soon….
My first short fiction collection, Angler In Darkness, is now up for preorder in ebook formats. Release is scheduled August. The print version will follow close behind.
These are 18 stories running the gamut from fantasy, to dark adventure and horror, some in print for the first time, with a great cover by M. Wayne Miller and design by Shawn King.
A frontiersman of bizarre pedigree is peculiarly suited to tracking down a group of creatures rampaging across the settlements of the Texas Hill Country…..
A great white hunter is shaken to his core by a quarry he cannot conceive of….
A bullied inner city kid finds the power to strike back against his tormentors and finds he can’t stop using it….
Outraged plumbing plots its revenge….
Here Blackfoot Indians hunt the undead, the fate of nations is decided by colossal monsters, a salaryman learns the price of abandoning his own life, and even the Angel of Death tells his story.
Currently available for preorder in a number of fine e-retailers.
books2read.com/u/3JK9zP
A howling westerly wind blows down the center of a wide, dusty street, carrying with it a vagabond tumbleweed and the unmistakable smells of gun oil and fear.
A lone figure steps off the boardwalk into the street, lowering the wide brim of his hat against the wind. Shutters and doors slam as he passes, as if any of them can shut out the violence that’s to come.
The man’s spurs clink on the heels of his boots, the tail of his duster flaps and balloons behind him, offering hints of the tools of his trade. Poised like blunted horns in the holsters tied to his legs are the walnut grips of a pair of .44 pistols.
The man reaches the center of the street and hooks his coat behind the butts of his pistols.
“Alright, marshal!” he roars, elbows bent, fingers stroking the handles of his revolvers. “You called down the thunder, now come on out and catch the lightning!”
There is a whirring, hissing sound, and big shadow falls across the man in the street.
The shadow of his hat brim recedes as he cranes his neck upward, and his narrow eyes widen.
BLAM!
The shot echoes, a tremendous cannon crash that rattles the windows and makes the horses kick over the troughs and roll their eyes and scream all up and down the avenue.
When the dense, acrid cloud of smoke clears, a pair of smoking boots and a charred hat turning in place like a fallen penny in the middle of a dark patch of scorched ground are all that’s left of the gunman.
A clanking conglomeration of iron and steel, three times the size of a man, twirls a massive, smoking Colt revolver on its armored finger, then drops it into a holster the size of a steer on its jointed, rust spotted hip.
The metal man’s face creaks open and a grizzled looking man with grey whiskers and a star on his vest grins a yellow grin.
“Looks like you came underdressed to this occasion, Billy,” the marshal says through his cheroot….
Readers of this blog will be aware of my fondness for and recent rediscovery of tabletop roleplaying games. Well, I went and wrote one.
This is MechaWest, bringing the anime giant robot suit action of Heroic Journey Publishing’s Mecha roleplaying game system to the American Old West. Here high noon showdowns are fought in lumbering iron suits, powered by chugging boilers burning coal and wood. Cowboys race among lowing cattle in fleet footed rooster walkers, ready with lasso launchers, branding irons and barb wire clipper arms, and Indian Iron Killer Societies eschew the white man’s technology, using ingenious guerrilla tactics to bring shining blue and gold cavalry mecha crashing to their literal knees.
In the alternate history of MechaWest fighting mecha have been around since the Napoleonic Wars in the form of elegant clockwork suits of oak and tin worn by officers and gentlemen duelists, moving jerkily up and down the lines of battle with large flowing capes, and sweeping through lines of infantry with gargantuan rapiers.
But when American engineer Robert Fulton places a steam engine into an old clockwork knight the gilded age of gentlemanly dueling ends and a new era of mechanized warfare begins. The first mecha see service in the Mexican War of Independence, new iron armored suits effectively retiring the Army of Spain and their outdated clockwork mecha.
In the subsequent Mexican American war, gunsmith Samuel Colt invents a repeating fire weapon that turns each mecha into a walking battalion. Then abolitionists John Brown and Frederick Douglass seize a squad of mecha from the federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia and lead an army of free slaves into the West Virginia mountains, forming the free state of New Africa and touching off the American Civil War. When blue and gray machines clash, the conflict is catastrophic.
The harsh necessities of the post-war American West mother strange inventions, from the circling Steel Schooners of the pioneers to transforming mecha-trains that dig their own tunnels and transform to fight off robbers.
Players in MechaWest can work for a cattle baron’s outfit, piloting swift iron giants with to herd beef across hostile Native American lands, or as the Iron Killers, elite warriors who bring down the white man’s metal machines with whatever resources they can muster. Maybe riding as an Iron Ranger, splitting their time chasing Indians and bringing justice to marauding outlaws are more their bag, or perhaps dodging the law in a rattletrap mecha held together with baling wire and burning moonshine, sporting the latest illegal weaponry is more their style.
When the ‘Chinese Freemen Syndicate’ seizes the mines and railroads they worked to build en masse and fort up in their Celestial Territories with flame throwing Dragon Mecha and daring highbinder pilots, the possibilities open up even more. Do the players want to play as a band of Chinese agents in exotic, sought-after mecha? Do they want to plays as the US Cavalry, mounting punitive expeditions against marauding tribes or besieging the Celestial Territories for much needed resources?
Independent warlords, cattle barons and criminal organizations all seek to rule the frontier with steam driven iron fists. And amongst every faction pass the Gunfighters, deft pilots-for-hire, each with their own agenda.
This is the era of MechaWest…
Written by myself and Jeff Carter, and based on Chris Perrin’s core rpg system Mecha, with Wayne Humfleet and Mark Reed.
We have thirty days to reach our art and production goal. Please head over there and kick a buck.
Up for preorder from Chaosium Books and editors Brian Sammons and Glynn Owen Barrass is Steampunk Cthulhu, featuring stories from Jeffrey Thomas, Adam Bolivar, Carrie Cuinn, William Meikle, John Goodrich, Lee Clark Zumpe, D.J. Tyrer, Christine Morgan, Christopher M. Geeson, Thana Niveau, Leigh Kimmel, Josh Reynolds, Robert Neilson, Pete Rawlik, and including my story The Reverend Mister Goodworks and The Yeggs of Yig.
The book is due out June 16th and features a killer cover from Daniele Serra, who also did the cover for my novel Coyote’s Trail.
Readers of my Merkabah Rider series may recognize the name The Reverend Mister Goodworks from the final book in the series, Once Upon A Time In The Weird West.
Also known as The Reverend Shadrach Mischach Abednego Carter, a former train engineer who, after a horrific crash, is partially reconstructed with steam engine parts and becomes a battling preacher dedicated to the destruction of evil, the Reverend Mr. Goodworks plays a sizable part in the events of Once Upon A Time In The Weird West.
This story can be considered a prequel spinoff which directly ties into the the last MR novel, and provides some insight into the character.
I actually wrote this some time before I published Once Upon A Time In The Weird West, so I’m excited to see it in print at last. It involves the servants of the Lovecraftian deity Yig (obviously), and ties into the Old Testament story of the Nehushtan.
In this story, the Reverend encounters a distraught pregnant Mexican woman fleeing across the desert at night. Although she begs him to kill her before they are born, the Reverend delivers her children, only to be attacked by them as they slither from her womb; a pair of vicious serpent-human hybrids. He sets out to find those responsible for this abomination….
Here’s an excerpt.
_______________________________________
The Reverend lurched into New Valusia sometime before noon, the sand grinding in his knee joints. It was little more than a few communal frame houses, some gardens, and a couple outbuildings, all arranged around a two story farmhouse with a veranda.
On the porch stood a strikingly tall, lean, yellow haired woman in a white and purple robe. She folded her sun freckled arms at his approach.
Several of the New Valusians in white cassocks rose from their various tasks to interpose themselves, bearing only shovels and hoes as weapons. The Reverend was forced to halt or else plough through them.
He stood quietly, a head taller than their tallest, and surveyed the small crowd.
“Which of you is Susannah?” he bellowed at last.
“I’m Sister Susannah Coyle,” said the woman on the porch. “What brings you here?”
“The Lord brang me here,” drawled the Reverend, unfastening his coat.
“Well, the Lord welcome you.”
“Not your lord, bitch,” growled the Reverend.
He threw open his greatcoat like a knightly tabard.
Beneath, his body was flat black with steel accents, like the shell of a richly ornamented locomotive engine. Indeed, his chest resembled the face of a locomotive, with the dim lamp set in the center. His torso was further festooned with dancing pressure gauges and valve wheels, like a harness of little metal daisies. His heavy, ironclad legs bristled with pistons and driveshafts that plunged and hissed as he moved.
There was a thick bandolier belted around his blocky waist. Hanging from the belt was an old LeMat pistol. He brought his left arm up sharply, accompanied by a series of mechanical whirs and clicks. The sleeve was split down the middle from elbow to cuff, allowing the arm to emerge from the fabric unencumbered. His right hand went to his elbow and jacked a brass lever there. A strange amalgamation of octagonal rifle barrels, three in number, and situated in a kind of pyramid one atop the other, appeared at the end of the metal arm.
The Reverend rightly assumed any of these New Valusians walking around of their own volition were acquiescent in the hell the young woman he’d buried had been put through. He had no compunctions about firing into their midst, but he directed his aim at the statuesque Susannah Coyle, furiously levering his tri-repeater arm and cutting loose with a rapid barrage.
The New Valusians weren’t used to facing gunfire and scattered, dropping their makeshift weapons in their mad flight.
Susannah Coyle didn’t budge. To his amazement, the fifteen bullets he had flung in her direction all stopped and hung suspended in mid-air a few feet from the porch, spinning in a tight group.
When he lowered his smoking arm, frowning, he became aware of a deep thrumming in the air.
The door to the house opened and two muscular white-clad men armed with primitive, two-handed stone headed mallets appeared.
“The Pacifier Field,” Susannah explained, flicking the spinning bullets one by one with her finger until they bounced down the porch steps and rolled harmlessly in the dust at the Reverend’s feet. “An electromagnetic generator. It protects our Nesting House from those who do violence. It’s on its most agreeable setting now, but when I order it directed against your person, it will repel all your metal components, even from each other. That suit of yours will come apart and fly to the compass points.”
“It’s not a suit,” said the Reverend.
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Steampunk Cthulhu is up for preorder now on Amazon.com.
I’m very proud to have my story BLACK TALLOW appearing in the inaugural book from Neil Baker’s April Moon Books, THE DARK RITES OF CTHULHU.
Neil is a fellow Star Wars What’s The Story alumn and Mythos enthusiast, and he’s wrangled some great talent for his house’s first book, including editor/author Brian M. Sammons, Glynn Owen Barrass, John Goodrich, Scott T. Goudsward, T. E. Grau, C.J. Henderson, Tom Lynch, the ever lovin’ William Meikle, Christine Morgan, Robert M. Price, Pete Rawlik, Josh Reynolds, Sam Stone, Jeffrey Thomas and Don Webb.
Lovecraft Ezine just did a midnight chat on the book which you can view here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRjmMBp7kw0
Unfortunately I had some technical issues and wound up missing it, but here’s what I WOULD have talked about –
Brian pitched Dark Rites to me as a Hammer Studios style take on the ritualistic aspect of the Lovecraftian Mythos, akin to Dennis Wheatley’s fiction (like The Devil Rides Out) and Curse Of The Demon. I latched onto the idea immediately (and had a hand in naming the book).
My story BLACK TALLOW is about a rare book translator and lapsed occultist who is called to the house of an old friend who claims to owe all his substantial worldly success to the pursuit of ritual magic. And yet, the wealthy practitioner is as yet spiritually unfulfilled, until he comes across a rare tome whose ultimate purpose is said to be to grant the occultist the greatest desire of his heart.
The story incorporates The Infernalius, a book which readers of my Merkabah Rider series will recognize.
Perhaps I share my character’s love of physical books, but I have to take a minute and talk about how impressed I am with the look of this anthology. As you can see, Neil distressed the cover image to give the book a very 1960’s paperback feel which I love. He’s also crafted a series of minimalist representational images for each of the stories.
Here’s an excerpt from BLACK TALLOW.
He moved to the book and removed the covering.
I leaned in close.
It was an ugly little thing, less than a hundred pages. It was bound in mottled, flaking, pale leather, and rather inexpertly, I thought. Some of the pages did not quite fit, as if they were mismatched, or taken from disparate sources. I squinted hard at the cover, which bore no markings. It was old, whatever it was.
“Anthropodermic bibliopegy,” he mumbled, very close to my ear. He was standing near, hovering almost.
“Binding in human skin?” I wrinkled my nose. Claims of book jackets made from human skin usually turned out to be unfounded. Pig skin was often mistaken for human. I had once seen a copy of deSade’s Justine et Juliette with a human nipple on the front board below the title, and another time, Carnegie’s biography of Lincoln bound in a black man’s hide. “Not very well done, is it?”
“It was stitched together by hand. By the same hand that did the fleshing and tanning.”
“Whose hand is that?” I asked, reaching out to thumb the pages.
“No, don’t open it!” he snapped. Then, more gently, “Let me.”
There was no title, only page after page of densely inscribed text, all in various hands, languages, even hieroglyphs on what looked like brittle papyrus. There were strange diagrams inside. I knew it was some kind of grimoire, but it was impossible for me to guess where it originated from.
“What is this, Paul? Some kind of scrapbook?”
“Sort of. Have you ever heard of the Infernalius?”
“It sounds….familiar.”
“Think back to the books we heard talked about in our college days, Raymond. The books your own grandfather had from his great uncle.”
That was Great Great Uncle Warren, the man family history had always told me I’d inherited my love of languages and old books from. He’d been a Classical Languages professor in Arkham, Massachussetts in the old days, and a chum of the somewhat notorious occult scholar Henry Armitage. Upon Warren’s death in 1931, most of his books and papers had been donated to his university, though a few had been passed on to his brother.
It was the revelation that I was Warren Rice’s great great grand nephew that had started off Paul’s fascination with me in school. He seemed to buy into the old story about how Warren and Armitage had had some strange mystical dealings in Dunwich in 1928 or so.
The books my grandfather had let us peruse in his study one summer that had belonged to Warren were mainly scholarly treatises, such as Copeland’s Zanthu Tablets: A Conjectural Translation, Casterwell’s Kranorian Annals, and von Junzt’s Nameless Cults.
Then I remembered.
“The Book of Books?”
Paul smiled.
“The Book of Books. Not some idle boast, but a literal description. A book hidden among the pages of seven other books.” He held up his hands and ticked them off, finger by finger. “The Book of Eibon, the Book of Karnak, the Testament of Carnamagos, the Ponape Scripture, de Vermiss Mysteriis, and the Scroll of Thoth-Amon. Each one a rare treasure in their own right.”
“Come on, Paul. It’s a fantasy,” I laughed. “The timeline’s all wrong. How could something be hidden in an ancient Egyptian scroll and a book written in 1542?”
“You know of the Akashic Record. The ethereal library of all knowledge written and unwritten which men may tap into. And the history says that The Dark Man entity dictated The Infernalius to the Hyborean wizard Gargalesh Svidren, who dispersed the knowledge through time. Abdul Al-Hazred hid the assembly instructions in the original, unexpurgated Arabic Kitab al-Azif. They’re only visible to those who already know it’s there. A book which rewards the practitioner with ultimate knowledge of the universe.”
“I thought it was supposed to end the world,” I said, pursing my lips. “How much did you get fleeced for buying this, Paul?”
“It’s the genuine article,” said Paul. “Dr. Francis Morgan recovered it from Old Noah Whateley’s personal library in Dunwich after the affair with your uncle and Professor Armitage. It’s been in a private collection since 1966, along with Whateley’s diary.”
“Noah Whateley kept a diary?” I said, incredulous.
Whateley’s reputation as a sorcerer was renowned, but like my own as a translator, only among certain circles. As students, we’d spent our junior year spring break in Arkham and Dunwich trying to learn all we could about him and run into a wall. I’d chalked it all up to being folklore. Paul had insisted the locals had protected us from the true knowledge.
“He did, and related his assembly of the book in 1882.”
“Finding the right copies of those books, unaltered by translation….it would’ve been impossible for one man,” I said.
“He was hired by a cult, the Order of The Black Dragon. You remember them.”
I nodded. Von Junzt had mentioned them, some sort of apocalyptic cult with origins in ancient Israel and adherents all over the globe.
“Their members gathered the required books and brought them to Whateley. He assembled them, and once the Order had performed the ritual and taken what they wanted from the book, he was sent back to Dunwich with it. Apparently it was their intention to call something forth, something that should have ended the world.”
“Well, so the book’s a fraud,” I said. “Obviously the world didn’t end.”
“The book’s purpose isn’t to end the world, but to grant the ritualist his heart’s desire. The Order wanted the end of the world. The book gave them the means. The book changes to fit the magician’s desire.”
“A book that changes? That’s crazy….”
—–
THE DARK RITES OF CTHULHU is available now in Kindle, and for preorder in paperback. Neil’s made some cool perks for the special edition of the book too, so check them out here.
http://www.aprilmoonbooks.com/#!the-dark-rites-of-cthulhu/c1q0a
Delirium Tremens 