Undead in the West II: They Just Keep Coming

by Cynthia J. Miller Institute for Liberal Arts, Emerson College (Editor), A. Bowdoin Van Riper (Editor)

Overview

The undead are back! In Undead in the West: Vampires, Zombies, Mummies, and Ghosts on the Cinematic Frontier, Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper assembled a collection of essays that explored the unique intersection of two seemingly distinct genres in cinema: the western and the horror film.

In this new volume, Undead in the West II: They Just Keep Coming, Miller and Van Riper expand their examination of undead Westerns to include not only film, but literature, sequential art, gaming, and fan culture (fan fiction, blogging, fan editing, and zombie walks). These essays run the gamut from comics and graphic novels such as American Vampire, Preacher, and Priest, and games like Darkwatch and Red Dead Redemption, to novels and short stories by celebrated writers including Robert E. Howard, Joe R. Lansdale, and Stephen King.

Featuring a foreword by renowned science fiction author William F. Nolan (Logan’s Run) and an afterword by acclaimed game designer Paul O’Connor (Darkwatch), this collection will appeal to scholars of literature, gaming, and popular culture, as well as to fans of this unique hybrid.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810892651
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	10/18/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	386
File size:	59 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Cynthia J. Miller is the editor of Too Bold for the Box Office: The Mockumentary from Big Screen to Small (Scarecrow, 2012), and co-editor, with Julie Anne Taddeo, of the award-winning Steaming Into a Victorian Future: A Steampunk Anthology (Scarecrow, 2012).

A. Bowdoin Van Riper is the editor of Learning from Mickey, Donald and Walt: Essays on Disney’s Edutainment Films (2011) and author of A Biographical Encyclopedia of Scientists and Inventors in American Film and TV since 1930 (Scarecrow, 2011).

Together, they are the editors of Undead in the West (Scarecrow, 2012) and 1950s Rocketman TV Series and Their Fans: Cadets, Rangers, and Junior Space Men (2012).

Table of Contents

Foreword: In the Beginning—Frederick Faust’s Western Fantasies
William F. Nolan
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper

Part I: Pioneers on a Wide-Open Frontier
Chapter 1 Vaqueros and Vampires in the Pulps: Robert E. Howard and the Dawn of the Undead West
Jeffrey Shanks and Mark Finn
Chapter 2 Weird Western Comic Books of the 1950s
Paul Green
Chapter 3 Filling Up the West with Dead Folks: Joe R. Lansdale
Cynthia J. Miller
Chapter 4 On Death’s Horizon: Wandering Spirits and Otherworldly Landscapes in Western Art and Cinema
Courtney Fellion

Part II: Lawmen and Gunmen in the Badlands
Chapter 5 Genre Exchange on the Supernatural Frontier in Stephen King’s The Gunslinger: The Gunfighter
Archetype Meets the Ravenous Other
Adam S. Kozaczka
Chapter 6 Vampires and Vermin: The Ambivalence of Historical and Generic Revision of the West(ern)
in Darkwatch
Christina V. Cedillo
Chapter 7 Finding a Noble Purpose in the Postapocalyptic Zombie West: Identity Development in Jonathan
Maberry’s Rot and Ruin
Julia Saric
Chapter 8 Allegorical Confrontation Meets Gaming System: Rhetoric and Trauma within Red Dead Redemption / Undead Nightmare
M. Melissa Elston
Chapter 9 Go West, Young Fang! Skinner Sweet as Outlaw and American Vampire
Andrew John Sneddon and Aspasia Stephanou

Part III: Men of God on Hallowed Ground
Chapter 10 A Baptism of Blood: Priest and the Regeneration of Violence on Min-Woo Hyung’s Frontier
William Grady
Chapter 11 Ghosts of Texas: The Duke, the Vampire, and the Saint of Killers in Preacher
Jim Casey and Marc Petersen
Chapter 12 “And Hell Followed with Him”: Gothic Economics in Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider (1985)
John Edgar Browning
Chapter 13 Scratching Open Old Wounds: The Supernatural Brujo and the Undead Body in The Missing and
The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
Jericho Williams

Part IV: Communities at the Edge of the Unknown
Chapter 14 Days Gone Bye: Robert Kirkman’s Reenvisioned Western The Walking Dead
Jeffrey A. Sartain
Chapter 15 Genre Mashing in the Role-Playing Game Deadlands: The Weird West, the Horror Steampunk Western
Rachel Mizsei Ward
Chapter 16 Unsettled: Ghosts, Zombies, and Indians in the American West
C. Richard King
Chapter 17 Undead and Online: Fan Communities and the Undead Western
Matthias Stork and A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Afterword
Paul O’Connor

Index
About the Contributors
About the Editors

Editorial Reviews

The Western is dead: pundits have forever proclaimed such. So it seems both ironic and absolutely logical that in the postmodern era the form should be seen as vitally undead. Moreover, volumes like this one demonstrate that the Western's scholarship continues vigorously alive.

Jim Kitses

Recommended for students of the horror genre and those who know vampires and zombies belong in the Old West mythos.

Rocky Wood

This book proves that the dead and the undead are the most alive things in the West.

Stephen Graham Jones

Fans of comic books have no problem embracing stories that mash-up genres in an un-ironic way. I think these kinds of mash-ups can revitalize the genres being played with. Taking Western genre characters and placing them in non-genre stories or placing non-genre characters into Western genre settings is a great way to keep these stories fresh.

Scott Stewart

Focusing on portrayals of the western frontier and the undead in cinema and television, the first Undead in the West (2012) book confined its analysis to a specific medium. Here, Miller and Van Riper widen their editorial scope to essays examining a myriad of Western genre bending formats: pulp fiction, comics, board games, video games, and blogs. The volume is thematically partitioned into four segments, each reflecting an iconic element of traditional Western narratives: pioneers, lawmen and gunmen, men of god, and communities. The first collection of essays examines the pioneering work of Robert E. Howard, Joe R. Landsdale, and many other writers, in broadening the boundaries of the Weird Western. Complicating the simplistic binary of 'good guy versus bad guy' in the Western narrative, the second collection of essays critically assess the genre hybridity of Stephen King’s The Gunslinger, the development of steampunk horror, and the ideology of Red Dead Redemption. Encounters with the undead by men of faith shapes the third part of the volume, exploring Clint Eastwood’s Pale Rider and the graphic novel Priest. Analyzing the concept of community in AMC’s The Walking Dead, the role-playing game Deadlands, and fan Websites, the authors in the final section of the book parse concepts of gender, race, and national memory in portrayals and fans of the undead. Coupled with the first volume, Miller and Van Ripper have created a work of broad historical and critical synthesis. Ranging from pulp to video games, this robust collection of essays provides a much-needed foundational text in this ever-evolving genre. This work is recommended for both public and academic libraries, given the breadth and depth of the topic.

American Reference Books Annual