The Knight With Two Swords
Page 40
COYOTE’S TRAIL (Comet Press)
In 1886 a bloodied and battered Chiricahua Apache boy drags himself out of the Arizona desert, intent on revenge. He kidnaps a Mexican prostitute and with the help of a sadistic whiskey peddler, uses her as bait to lure the cavalrymen who massacred his family out from the safety of their fort, unaware that the woman is pursuing her own bizarre course of revenge.
PRAISE FOR COYOTE’S TRAIL:
"With COYOTE'S TRAIL, Ed Erdelac has created a story as raw as the wound from a bullwhip. His blistering prose, combined with superb use of time, place, and character, gives COYOTE'S TRAIL the kind of life that springs off the page and into the reader's consciousness. That's a rare thing these days, and in the world of genre fiction, rarer still. This is a damn hard story about damn hard men, and told damn well." --C. Courtney Joyner, Author of SHOTGUN and NEMO RISING
ANGLER IN DARKNESS
This first collection of short fiction spans nearly a decade of fishing in the sunless depths of the imagination, some brought to light here for the first time. 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.
PRAISE FOR ANGLER IN DARKNESS
“If you’re new to Erdelac’s work, Angler in Darkness is a fabulous introduction, a bizarre medley of the perverse, sinister, and strange. Erdelac weaves a refreshingly unabashed tapestry, his blunt naturalistic dialogue hitting as hard as the visceral thrills splashing across the pages. Most importantly, his work gives voice to diverse points-of-view, his protagonists arriving from walks of life often overlooked in genre fiction. Angler in Darkness is a provocative, compelling, and deliciously devilish anthology from one of the most talented voices in fantasy fiction, and a must read for aficionados of the unusual.” – Cemetery Dance
“Erdelac’s first collection of 15 reprints and three previously unpublished stories runs the gamut of monster mayhem and historical weirdness, with plenty of gore to satisfy horror aficionados…. Erdelac has a gift for inspiring fascination with whatever era he chooses to write about, especially the Wild West, where he shines. This entertaining and varied collection, enhanced by the author’s story prefaces, will appeal to a wide variety of horror readers.” – Publisher’s Weekly
"You'll find history not sanitized and prettied up for modern sensibilities; this is the raw stuff, the gritty stuff, with the ugliness and racism right there alongside the bravery and beauty.
Sometimes, the tales focus on the small-scale, families or individuals, lonely journeys, confrontations with cruel mortality and truth. In others, the fates of nations are at stake. There's variety here, a display of ranges -- temporal, stylistic, genre -- and it all serves to reinforce my initial opinion. Whatever the era, Ed Erdelac does historical fiction RIGHT." - This Is Horror
WITH SWORD AND PISTOL (Crossroads Press)
Collects four fantasy adventure novellas.
RED SAILS - In 1740 a British marine and a Dominican Blackfriar are captured on the high seas by a blood guzzling pirate captain and turned loose on a cannibal isle to be hunted down for sport under the full moon by his shapeshifting crew.
NIGHT OF THE JIKININKI - In 1737 three disparate men, a casteless bandit, a sadistic samurai sword tester, and a mad, child killing monk band together to fight their way out of a feudal Japanese prison as it fills with the walking dead.
SINBAD AND THE SWORD OF SOLOMON - In 796, Sinbad the Sailor and motley crew undertake a mission from the Caliph of Baghdad to retrieve a magic sword from a demon on an enchanted island.
GULLY GODS - In 2005 a young South Houston gangster learns the horrific secret behind the power behind a seemingly unstoppable clique of Liberian ex-child soldiers taking over a South Chicago neighborhood.
Hundreds of years removed. Thousands of miles apart. They all make their end WITH SWORD AND PISTOL.
MERKABAH RIDER: HIGH PLANES DRIFTER
A Hasidic gunslinger tracks the renegade teacher who betrayed his mystic Jewish order of astral travelers across the demon-haunted American Southwest of 1879.
In this acclaimed first volume, four sequential novellas and one bonus short story chronicle the weird adventures of THE MERKABAH RIDER.
In THE BLOOD LIBEL, The Rider fights to save the last survivors of a frontier Jewish settlement not only from a maddened lynch mob, but from a cult of Molech worshippers hiding in their midst. In THE DUST DEVILS, a border town is held hostage by a band of outlaws in league with a powerful Vodoun sorcerer. In HELL'S HIRED GUN, The Rider faces an ex-Confederate sharpshooter who has pledged his allegiance to Hell itself. In THE NIGHTJAR WOMEN, The Rider drifts into a town where children cannot be born. Here an antediluvian being holds the secret to his fugitive master's insidious plan; a plot that threatens all of Creation. Finally, never before collected, THE SHOMER EXPRESS. On a midnight train crossing the desert, a corpse turns up desecrated. Someone stalking the cars has assumed its shape, and only The Rider can stop it.
PRAISE FOR MERKABAH RIDER:
“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