Genres
Weird West
A subgenre blending the Western with fantasy, horror and science fiction: frontier settings of strange encounters, hauntings and impossible machines.
Weird West, also called Weird Western, is a subgenre that blends elements of the Western genre with those of fantasy, horror and science fiction: frontier settings, strange encounters and, often, steampunk elements. The mode is older than its name, running through 1930s B-movie Westerns, movie serials and pulp magazines; the name comes from DC Comics' Weird Western Tales (1972), and Joe R. Lansdale's Dead in the West (1983) anchors the prose shelf.
For novel and web-serial writers the genre is the Western skeleton with the uncanny riding in: sparse authority, immediate consequences, a drifting cast, and something wrong in the hills. Its closest kin is the space western, which transplants the frontier to outer space; the Weird West instead haunts the historical frontier itself, letting horror, fantasy or lost science surface where civilization thins out.