Now is probably a good time to profess my love for Joe R. Lansdale and Tim Truman’s series of Jonah Hex comics. Between that and the Tremors movies, I am kind of shocked it took until 2017 for Call of Cthulhu’s American West sourcebook Down Darker Trails to come out.

The weird and the west go together well. Frontiers are scary places – wide open land and isolated communities make good hunting grounds for predators of all kinds (see: Ravenous, Bone Tomahawk, The Burrowers, Jack London, Blood Meridian). The main inspiration behind this book is the work of Lovecraft associate and Texas native Robert E. Howard, though Lovecraft himself wrote several tales set in the Southwest (all ghostwritten for other authors). Other inspirations include Valley of Gwangi and Deadwood – but basically there is DNA from whatever your favorite Western might be somewhere in the book (you can even go Wild, Wild West with it using the Pulp Cthulhu rules).

The result is a fully formed setting book. There are two hub locations for campaigns – Pawheton in the Dakota territories and San Rafael on the Texas/Mexico border. Both have plenty of plot seeds and are amply supported by the historical material that makes up the bulk of the book (lots of stats for famous folks!). Sections on folklore and terrible places to visit (like the bleak para-dimension of the Shadow Desert or the subterranean city of K’n-yan) follow. Two adventures round things out – a Yig-centric affair and one that reminds me quite a bit of the Masters of Horror adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s The Damned Thing. Each one capitalizes on one of the hub towns in pretty satisfactory manner, making for two entirely different campaign starting points.

This has way more punch and usability than a lot of previous CoC setting books (thinking of the Secrets line) and displays an open love for all things Western.  If you dig westerns and horror, you’ll be happy.