The Shotgun Arcana by R.S. Belcher (English) Paperback Book

Description: The Shotgun Arcana by R.S. Belcher "One fast-paced sci-fi/steampunk Western peppered with double-crosses, surprise revelations and a splendid showdown." - The Washington Post FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description R. S. Belchers debut novel, The Six-Gun Tarot, was enthusiastically greeted by critics and readers, who praised its wildly inventive mixture of dark fantasy, steampunk, and the Wild West. Now Belcher returns to Golgotha, Nevada, a bustling frontier town that hides more than its fair share of unnatural secrets.Golgotha in 1870 is a haven for the blessed and the damned, including a fallen angel, a mad scientist, a pirate queen, and a deputy who is kin to coyotes. The town has come through many nightmarish trials. Now an army of 32 outlaws, lunatics, serial killers, and cannibals are converging on the town, drawn by a grisly relic that dates back to the Donner Party . . . and the dawn of humanity.Sheriff Jon Highfather and his deputies already have their hands full dealing with train robbers, a mysterious series of brutal murders, and the usual outbreaks of weirdness. But with some of the most vicious killers on Earth riding into Golgotha in a just a few days time, the town and its people will be tested as never before-and some of them will never be the same.Now in trade paperback, The Shotgun Arcana confirms R.S. Belchers status as a rising star. Author Biography R.S. Belcher is the acclaimed author of The Six-Gun Tarot, which made several years best fantasy lists. He lives in Salem, Virginia. Promotional "One fast-paced sci-fi/steampunk Western peppered with double-crosses, surprise revelations and a splendid showdown." - The Washington Post Review Quote "A worthy addition to Belchers highly imaginative series, with a large cast that is both magical and mundane and a well-drawn historical setting. Weird West fans will happily gobble this up."- Library Journal "Golgotha is the Wildest of the Wild West . . . giving readers plenty of reason to look forward to the next installment."- Publishers Weekly "Belcher proves hes no one-trick pony with the second installment of his wildly adventurous and humorously horrifying Golgotha series . . .Charismatic characters and a stunning blend of history, legend, religion and modern sensibility intertwine to create a world that embraces the strange and fantastical."- RT Book Reviews "Compelling and action-packed."- Kirkus Reviews Promotional "Headline" "One fast-paced sci-fi/steampunk Western peppered with double-crosses, surprise revelations and a splendid showdown." - The Washington Post Excerpt from Book Temperance (Reversed) February 18, 1847 California Bloody footprints in the snow greeted the rescue party from Bear Valley. They approached the camp from the direction of frozen Truckee Lake. The stained tracks veered, looped and crossed themselves-a drunken, demonic scrawl, an artist signing an infernal work in crimson. They ended at a mound of snow and ice roughly the size of a man. "John, go check out that drift," Reason Tucker said to one of the Rhoads brothers. Tucker was a big man, broad, with a plain face and kind eyes. He wrapped his exhausted horses reins around a low-hanging tree branch, trembling with fresh snow, and patted her shivering neck. "Rest of yall start making a noise, call out. See if anyone is alive." Mr. Eddy had told them where they would find the cabins, but all Tucker could see were misshapen hills of snow. So much snow, like the Almighty had grown tired of creating and had just decided to white it all out. On the way up the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Ned Coffeemeyer had opined over their puny campfire, likening the snow and the violence of the blizzards to the Great Flood of Noahs time, swallowing up the wicked. "Thats a myth," the dark stranger said as he rolled a cigarette. The stranger had joined the party after they set out from Fort Sutter. Knowing what dire and ugly work was likely afoot once they reached the camp, if they reached the camp, the remaining seven members of the rescue party had taken the stranger up on his offer to join them. They had lost so many men. Some dead, due to the weather and the treachery of the climb, others deserting due to fear of certain death. The somber-garbed strangers appearance, with his black hair, goatee and mustache, his fine ebony horse and his eyes the color of sin, stark against the snow, had seemed like providence. "The flood wasnt Gods doing," the stranger said. "You dont believe in the holy word of the Lord, sir, the Bible?" Daniel Rhoads said across the campfire, rising slightly in agitation at what he perceived as blasphemy. The stranger narrowed his eyes and regarded Rhoads. The gaze was enough to knock all the righteous anger and the surly irritation of the trail out of Rhoads and freeze him in his tracks. His brother, John, took his arm and pulled him back to his seat on the fallen log. "Let him be, Danny," John said softly. "Sumbitch got eyes like a rattler. Nothing good gonna come from riling him." "To answer your question, sir," the stranger said, and then licked his rolling paper. "I do believe in the Almighty, more than most, Id wager. I just dont believe everything I read." "You have some queer views on the Good Book, Mr.…," Septimous Moutrey said, sipping his cold, bitter black coffee. "Bick," the dark stranger said, lighting his quirley. "Malachi Bick." Now, seeing the massive mountains of snow where the cabins should be, Tucker had visions of women and children, still, cold, buried in tombs of ice. Frozen, dried up, like the pharaohs of old, some leaning with blood-caked fingernails against doors sealed by tons of snow and ice. Unmoving in the frozen darkness. Joseph Selss shout, frantic and muffled by the eerie, silent weight of the winter tableau, snapped Tucker back to his senses. "Captain Tucker! Up here! Its bodies, sir!" Tucker and the others shuffled-waddled-ran as best they could to avoid the sudden trap of falling into a thirty-foot snowdrift, which didnt support their weight. All of the party were shouting now, hollering out greetings and calls for any survivors to come into the washed-out daylight. Sels had climbed a narrow path behind one of the drifts that should have concealed a cabin. Tucker and John and Daniel Rhoads joined him. Daniel was still ill from the rarity of the air this high up in the Sierra, fighting for each breath. Piled obscenely, like firewood, were human bodies: dozens of bodies, all frozen stiff and partly clothed. They were covered by a few inches of newly fallen snow. Near the bodies was a wide, low tree stump with a rusted axe, its blade buried in the wood. Blood had seeped into the wood grain of the frozen stump "Children," Sels said in a whisper. "So many children. Theyre so tiny…" Sels was a coarse man. He had been a sail∨ he had lived a harsh life on and off the sea, and was only a few steps ahead of a deserters noose. He had seen much ugliness in this world, but the tiny stiff forms, the sunken faces, brought him to his knees. He crossed himself and muttered the Lords Prayer to the cold children. "Most of the adults were lost when Graves party tried to make it to Bear Valley," Tucker said, putting his hand on the former sailors shoulder. "Say your peace, but be quick. Its getting dark, and we need to keep looking." There were more shouts from the other men of the party, but Tucker didnt hear Bicks powerful, controlled baritone among them. Looking at the bodies, Tucker allowed a grim fantasy to cross his weary mind-that Bick, the stranger, garbed in black and astride a stallion the color of coal, was Death himself, come for an accounting. "You were right about that drift with the bloody tracks, Captain," John Rhoads said. "Dead man. Been that way a long time-almost looks like some kind of a ghoul. He didnt have any shoes, but he was dragging a leg bo≠ looked the right size to be a mans too." "Lord preserve us, the stories are true; theyve degraded to man-eaters, cannibals," Sel said, rising off the snow and fumbling for his pistol under his coats and cloak. "Steady," Tucker said. "We have nothing but scandalous rumor, gents. Lets not fly off the-" "Captain!" It was the teamster, Sept Moutrey, shouting. "Look, they are coming out of the ground! The dead rising!" In the feeble, struggling twilight, Tucker and the others began to see sections of the large and small snow mounds shudder and the snow fall away. Figures-skeletal, dirty, and pale-began to crawl, to rise, from the drifts. For a second, even Tucker felt fear clutch his stomach and balls. It was as if the snow itself had given up its corpses and animated them with a cruel mockery of life. Bick appeared from a tangle of trees off to the left of the cluster of buried cabins. He walked quickly toward a shriveled, dark-haired creature that may have once been a human. She had appeared out of a hole in a drift near the center of the camp, and even in her pathetic state, she moved as if she were in charge. There was a nobility, a scrap of will in her that had not been devoured in the long frozen horror. She stood and regarded Bick, while the other rescuers struggled to approach her as well. One of her small hands covered her mouth, the other hung limply at her side. She looked at the dark stranger with the last of the tears she could muster from the well of her soul. "Are you men from California, or do you come from Heaven?" the woman asked. Her voice was a dry rasp. Tucker and the others had arrived now. Tucker noticed the rescue party was looking at the woman with revulsion and more than a little fear. She was like a bleached corpse, still moving, barely. Her face was a skull with pale, blotchy skin pulled too tight over it, like a drum. Tucker was surprised at how Bick regarded the woman, though. It was the first time since Tucker had met him that Bick had compassion in his eyes. "These men are from California," Bick said. "They have come to help you, take you home." "Im Levianh Murphy," the woman said. She faltered, her eyes rolling back as she began to fall. Tucker and several of the men rushed forward to catch her, but Mrs. Murphy regained herself and stayed on her feet. "Thank you, gentlemen," Mrs. Murphy said. "The Lord God has sent you to us, as providence. Im sorry we cant offer you better hospitality." Tucker heard Bick mutter under his breath as more of the cadaverous survivors crawled from their holes and gathered around Mrs. Murphy and the rescue party. "Remarkable," Bick said softly. "You people never cease to amaze me." * * * Darkness fell over Truckee Lake and the razor wind howled through the survivor camp, vicious and brazen, ripping into the makeshift shelters and rattling the collapsing cabins the survivors and rescuers huddled in. The full moon, bright and accusing like a vengeful queen, burned cold, silent light onto the camp. The man out in the snow with the human leg bone was identified by Mrs. Murphy as a Mr. Wolfinger. She implied that he had met his fate at the hands of another member of the party. When Tucker inquired about the leg bone, a queer look crossed Mrs. Murphys face. "It makes my soul sick," she said. "No one can sit in judgment of us, though, save the Good Lord above. Thats what Leanna told us." "Leanna?" Tucker said. "Leanna Donner," Murphy said. "Georges little girl." "Why in Gods name are you people listening to a child?" Tucker asked. "Because it talks to her," Mrs. Murphy said. "She is its High Details ISBN0765374595 Author R.S. Belcher Short Title SHOTGUN ARCANA Language English ISBN-10 0765374595 ISBN-13 9780765374592 Media Book Format Paperback Pages 400 Year 2015 Imprint Tor Books Country of Publication United States Series Golgotha Series Number 2 Translated from English Publication Date 2015-10-20 US Release Date 2015-10-20 UK Release Date 2015-10-20 Publisher St Martins Press DEWEY FIC Audience General AU Release Date 2015-11-09 NZ Release Date 2015-11-09 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:161215036;

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