My latest weird western story, “The Angel Azrael Rode Into the Town of Burnt Church on a Dead Horse,” just went live at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. As I mentioned earlier, BCS is one of my favourite speculative fiction magazines because it gives a damn about the literary in literature. The stories it publishes are all over the map, and usually indescribable, but they’re always damned good.

Readers who only know me through my novels Please and The Warhol Gang may be a bit surprised to discover I’ve written a weird western. In fact, it’s not the first weird western I’ve published. My story “The Fourth Horseman” won On Spec‘s story of the year award a few years back, and I’ve got another weird western that I’ve just finished and I’m looking to place now. I’ve also got a few other spec lit stories coming out in the near future, including a Cthulhu superhero story. Yeah, you read that right. But more on that later.

If you’ve checked out any of my other stories, though, you’ll know I have a taste for the fantastic or magic realism or spec lit or whatever you choose to call it. For instance, “We Continue to Pray for Something to End Our Prayers,” which you can read for free at This magazine, or “Beat the Geeks” (Kindle version here), “Has the World Ended Yet?” (Kindle version here) or “Deja Yu Makes the Pain Go Away” (Kindle version here). What can I say — I hate the world we live in….

Anyway, thanks to the generosity of the good people at Beneath Ceaseless Skies, you can read “The Angel Azrael” for free online, although you can also buy the issue, which includes a story by Marissa Lingen, for 99 cents on Kindle. And, of course, it’s free to subscribe to BCS.