‘The Six-Gun Tarot’ by R. S. Belcher is a Weird West tale about the town of Golgotha and why it is so weird. And there’s a lot of weird.
Something like six different character have their personal, and mythologically separate, tragic backstories play a role in the climax. It’s like a conspiracy pileup, the type of thing you get in tabletop RPGs when the game master tries to make all the players’ random ideas plot relevant. What I’m saying is that I’d be surprised if this hadn’t started out as the author’s ‘Deadlands’ campaign.
That said I kind of wish it was weirder; some random unrelated oddness gets mentioned as chronological references but the author ends up repeating a couple. There’s a love quadrangle playing out without any connection to the climax and that does a lot to care about the random townfolks, another subplot at that level would be nice.
I swear one of the pull quotes described this as a cross between ‘Deadwood’ and ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ which… maybe.
