Literature Dramatized

Dewey “Mac” McKenzie is wanted for a killing he didn’t commit. He saved his hide once by signing on as a cattle drive chuckwagon cook and bolting the territories. Turned out Mac was as good at fixing vittles as he was at dodging bullets. But Mac’s enemies are hungry for more — and they’ve hired a gang of ruthless killers to turn up the heat....

The train grinds to a halt somewhere in the Indian Nations, and the bandits get onboard. They take everything on the train worth stealing and gun down a guard to make their escape — just another notch on the belt for Ben Trout and Zack Larsen, two of the most savage killers in the west. US Deputy Marshal Ed Pine follows them to Muskogee. There the trail runs cold, and Ed Pine disappears.

In pursuit of a hardened enemy — Magus — Ryan and the companions find themselves in a land more foreign than any they've encountered. After unwittingly slipping through a time hole, the group lands in 20th-century New York City, getting their first glimpse of predark civilization. And they're not sure they like it. Only Mildred and Doc can appreciate this strange metropolis, but Armageddon is just 72 hours away, and Magus will stop at nothing to make sure Ryan and his team are destroyed on Nuke Day....

Archaeologist and explorer Annja Creed's fascination with the myths and mysteries of the past leads her to a crypt in the caves of France, where the terrifying legend of the Beast of Gevaudan hints at the unimaginable. What she discovers is shattering: an artifact that will seal her destiny; a brotherhood of monks willing to murder to protect their secret; and a powerful black-market occultist desperate to put his own claim to centuries-old blood money.

Their father is Luke Jensen, supposedly killed in the Civil War. Their uncle Smoke is one of the fiercest gunfighters the west has ever known. It's no surprise that the inseparable Ace and Chance Jensen have a knack for taking risks — even if they have to blast their way out of them. Chance is a bit of a hothead, good with his gun and his fists. Ace is more of a thinker, sharp as a snake bite and just as deadly quick. Their skills are put to the test when two young ladies ask them to protect their struggling stagecoach line from a ruthless, bloodthirsty mine owner.

Crater City, New Mexico, is a bustling mining town brimming with the stench of men hungry to get rich the old fashioned way - killing the competition. Dennis Conroy is the owner of the biggest saloon in town, and he needs a few good sharpshooters to help protect surveyors laying out a route for a spur rail lie before his rival Hugh Thornton beats him to it. Jo Buckhorn’s handy with a gun so he takes the job.

Apropos is the unlikely noble whose life began in the lowest of ways: as the result of a gang assault by a group of drunken knights on a helpless tavern wench. Last time out, Apropos attempted to seize control of his own fate, and ended up with, appropriately, nothing. Time has passed since he fled the kingdom of Runcible, and Apropos leads a quiet existence as a tavern owner. All that changes abruptly, however, when the sorceress Sharee re-enters his life with the forces of the warlike Lord Bellicose hard on her heels. They want something they're convinced she has stolen.

U.S. Deputy Marshal Will Tanner earned his badge the old-fashioned way. He shot the bad guys, saved the good guys, and won the fear and respect of everyone in between. That’s how legends are born. But when he visits a friend at his ranch and ends up confronting a trigger-happy horse thief, Will earns the wrath of the deadliest, lowlife killers west of the Mississippi. This is how legends die....Turns out Will Tanner is nothing but a moving target on a blood-soaked trail of revenge.

On the border between Mexico and Texas, Frank Morgan is caught between two warring ranchers, men who speak different languages but share the same stubborn courage - and are both being terrorized by a raider called the Black Scorpion. Texas Rangers are struggling to bring law and order to the chaos. But as the air is split by the sound of gunfire and men and women die, Morgan starts to see a different picture - and even comes face to face with the Black Scorpion himself. Suddenly, amidst deceptions, double-crosses and secret liaisons, the Last Gunfighter has become the next renegade.

After the events of Deathlands 131: Freak Pharm and the overthrow of the corrupt pseudo-medical theocracy there, Ryan Cawdor, Krysty Wroth, and their fellow companions had decided that the recovering community of Bomville would likely be the safest place to prepare for the eventual birth of Krysty’s child, rather than venturing out yet again into the unknown. Otherworldly circumstances soon convince Ryan and Krysty that the opposite is true.

When the mountain man Preacher chances upon a new settlement just as the notorious Pardee brothers are about to attack it, a chain of events unfolds that puts the mountain man smack in the middle of a nefarious plot fashioned by human vultures who prey on innocent pilgrims - a plot Preacher will risk his life to destroy. Before the dust settles, he’ll take on an ever-widening circle of villains, including Pawnees, Blackfoot, Red Hand’s band of renegade braves and a hand-picked team of assassins bent on his demise.

Conrad Browning is The Loner, a man on a mission, crossing the country — and crossing a lot of bad men — to rescue his kidnapped young twins. The trail has led him all the way to San Francisco’s perilous red light-district, where a crime lord is the proud father of newly adopted twins. The Loner knows his children when he sees them. But they’re hostage to a brutal, violent mob feud. Then, just when he needs it most, The Loner is no longer alone: He is joined by his own father, Frank Morgan — the most notorious gunman in the West.

The mountains are brimming with the lure of fortunes — from gold to a booming fur trade. A man at home in this once pristine wilderness, Preacher knows there’s no turning back civilization now. What he doesn’t know is that beyond the plans of some men is a deadly enemy with far more dangerous designs....

Deep beneath the ice of the Arctic Circle, something has awakened. A primordial creature frozen in time, it is the oldest, largest, most efficient predator that nature has ever produced. And it is ravenously hungry.... Thirty-five miles off the Massachusetts coast, a small research ship is attacked. All but one of its crew is killed by the massive serpentine horror that rises from the sea. The creature likes this human prey. The chewy outer hide. The tender saltiness within. And it wants more....

Apropos is the unlikely noble whose life began in the lowest of ways: as the result of a gang assault by a group of drunken knights on a helpless tavern wench. Last time out, Apropos attempted to seize control of his own fate, and ended up with, appropriately, nothing. Time has passed since he fled the kingdom of Runcible, and Apropos leads a quiet existence as a tavern owner. All that changes abruptly, however, when the sorceress Sharee re-enters his life with the forces of the warlike Lord Bellicose hard on her heels. They want something they're convinced she has stolen.

The Change occurred when an electrical storm centered over the island of Nantucket produced a blinding white flash that rendered all electronic devices and fuels inoperable - and plunged the world into a dark age humanity was unprepared to face....Michael Havel was flying over Idaho en route to the holiday home of his passengers when the plane’s engines inexplicably died, forcing a less than perfect landing in the wilderness. And as Michael leads his charges to safety, he begins to realize that the engine failure was not an isolated incident.

In the early days of the Civil War, rumors of gold in the frozen Klondike brought hordes of newcomers to the Pacific Northwest. Anxious to compete, Russian prospectors commissioned inventor Leviticus Blue to create a great machine that could mine through Alaska’s ice. Thus was Dr. Blue’s Incredible Bone-Shaking Drill Engine born. But on its first test run the Boneshaker went terribly awry, destroying several blocks of downtown Seattle and unearthing a subterranean vein of blight gas that turned anyone who breathed it into the living dead.

Cornerstone is a ville like no other that Ryan Cawdor and his companions have ever encountered. Hoping to find medical treatment for wounds sustained combating Magus and his creations, especially Ryan’s own debilitating injury, they have been brought to Cornerstone by their new friends, a relationship forged from those same battles. The ville appears to be a prosperous bastion of civilization, sheltered from the savagery of the Deathlands by virtue of the community’s relationship with an extraordinary manifestation of the will of Gaia.

Police Chief Delaney Reed thinks she knows all of Ordinary, Oregon’s secrets. Gods on vacation, lovelorn ghosts, friendly neighborhood monsters? Check. But some secrets run deeper than even she knows. To take down an ancient vampire hell-bent on revenge, she will have to make the hardest decision of her life: give up the book of dark magic that can destroy them all, or surrender her mortal soul.

On the eve of the Civil War, Kirby Jensen is the youngest of three children living on a hardscrabble ranch in Southwestern Missouri. But in 1861, shots were fired in Charleston harbor, and Kirby's father and brother went to war. Smoke Jensen: The Beginning follows the Jensen clan during these volatile years, from Civil War battles to border state raids to the kind of frontier justice achieved only by bullets and blood.