Cowboy Necromancer is out now!
Cowboy Necromancer is my first new series release of 2021, a post-apocalyptic LitRPG western to be released in February. It’s hard for me to contain my excitement about this book. I believe it bridges the gap between my more current writing style, exhibited in Pilgrim, and my early GameLit stuff, exhibited in The Feedback Loop. The book is long, divided into three parts, all revolving around Sterling Monedero, a cowboy necromancer who runs a pepper farm outside of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
The idea was first pitched jokingly to my writer-amigo, Luke Chmilenko, in one of our lengthy, meme-heavy message threads in the summer of 2019. I was fucking around at the time, telling him stories that I should one day write if I started writing under a pen name (which I did - Gideon Caldwell now writes books). I mentioned “Cowboy Necromancer” we lol’d and moved on.
I keep track of ideas when they come, so I put a folder in my google docs tab for ‘Cowboy Necromancer’. About a year later, I showed my Facebook readers’ group some of the ideas I had via a screenshot of folders, including one labeled, you guessed it, Cowboy Necromancer. The response was not what I expected. Those in the group wanted to know more about it, and through the thread, they even ended up naming our main character’s bone horse Manchester, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Cherry Blossom Girls series.
The grounds were set, and I began conceptualizing the book and its game system while listening to Tao Wong’s System Apocalypse, L.M Kerr’s Reborn Apocalypse, and Dakota Krout’s Completionist Chronicles and drawing from my own life in Texas, and the time I spent in a the piney woods of Bastrop with my sometimes tough-talking father and his local friends, several of whom were actual cowboys (or the closest thing to a cowboy that the late 20th/early 21st century can produce).
The research I’ve done for this book is the most extensive of any of my works yet. I’ve been fascinated with New Mexico, the setting for Cowboy Necromancer, since my first visit in the summer of 2009 when I accompanied my brother on his trip to Idaho, where he had been stationed. We only spent a day in the state, and it was mostly just passing through on our way to Colorado, but I was immediately inspired by the landscape and the people. I used the setting for my first book, Star-Spangled Apocalypse, and I used it multiple times in the Cherry Blossom Girls series.
Cowboy Necromancer’s usage of New Mexico is nothing like my earlier works. For this series, I’ve dug deeper than I ever have into the culture of a place, encapsulating everything from its geography to the various groups that have lived in and ruled over the Land of Enchantment, weaving their histories into this post-apocalyptic narrative. I went on a research trip to the state, spending time in the locations, from Truth or Consequences to Madrid, to get a better understanding of what it was like to be in these places, what it looked like, smelled like, and what the chilis tasted like.
Aside from location-based details, something I was looking for on my trip was primary documents, or at least secondary documents that weren’t as easy to find online. These documents turned out to be clippings from magazines, a book on witchcraft in New Mexico called Witchcraft in the Southwest, Hampton Sides’ Blood and Thunder (my absolute favorite history book at the moment), an old library book on Puebloan mythology published in the 1960s, and, as Sterling uses in Cowboy Necromancer, a heavily dog-eared travel guide which serves as a way to flesh out the world.
While it will seem that I have made shit up for this book — such as the “Juan Circle,” a ritual in which you find someone named Juan and perform a divination with him after having the man turn his shirt inside out; or the usage of toad venom as a hallucinogen; or some of the otherworldly names and locations that seem too good to be actual places like “The Turquoise Road” or “Truth or Consequences, New Mexico”— all of this was, alas, not my imagination. To shed a little light on my background —I have a degree in history—the usage and study of history is very important to me, and since I wasn’t making up histories for this book as I normally do for my series, I wanted them to be accurate. Any of the historical facts or dates listed are accurate, and should shed some light on the amazing history of the state of New Mexico, from its indigenous peoples to the Spaniards who arrived in the 1600s and changed the face of the landscape.
But none of that matters. What matters is an insanely cool story, and that’s what I believe I’ve written for you here.
The LitRPG game system is the most complex I’ve developed yet, with stats, class proficiencies and a technique system. The novel’s imagery spans the gap from the graphic novel series East of West to videogames Red Dead Redemption as well as Ghost of Tsushima (the haiku writing!), The Teachings of Don Jaun: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, and Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. While writing Cowboy Necromancer, I used Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as an inspirational text, listening to the audio to capture some of the bleak descriptions and savagery of his imagined Southwest. Music-wise, I went with things like ZZ Top (La Grange!) and Ennio Morricone, whose soundtracks for spaghetti westerns have shaped this book to an insane degree, as have pretty much anything by Gustavo Santaolalla or Roberto Lara (a late, but great discovery). The Sword’s High Country is an album that really pairs well with this story. I was certainly inspired by the Old Man Logan comic series (where I got the idea for Killbillies), and was even inspired by more contemporary westerns like Longmire and, for that matter, God’s Country. The comic series Scalped has been influential toward the end, although the book doesn’t deal with ‘rez life’ or operate as a Southwestern noir. Also inspiring this one, at least in terms of scenery, were the controversial video game, Last of Us 2, and the book The World Without Us.
So a lot has gone into this book, to craft a post-apocalyptic Southwest that just keeps on giving as our main character Sterling traverses the desert in search of his companions, battling amalgamations, bandits, militias, his own damn self at points, and the ominous alien Godwalkers. My wife, who has done some art in my books before, really stepped up her game for this one in a preview of what I plan to do in the future with some of my works. Expect sketchings from Sterling’s book of desert haiku and other items that expand the narrative, breathing even more life into this strange vision I’ve had that has become this world.
If you’ve never read one of my books, or haven’t read one in a while. You should start here. This is my work at its peak. If I’ve done my job right, and I think I have, this will be an adventure and a series you won’t soon forget!