Cosmic horror and splatter westerns collide in ALL OF YOUR DREAMS WILL COME TRUE WHEN YOU’RE DEAD by John Wayne Comunale (The Cadillac Man, Sinkhole). Appropriately due out on October 31st from Dead Sky Publishing / Death's Head Press, we have an exclusive excerpt you can read right now!
"The culling took most of the men from Cochran Texas away to a dusty old town that exists between this plane and the next called Cocytus. Run by a maniacal power-hungry man named Lycus and his adopted protégé daughter Alastor, he conducts chaos with the help of a group of bandits called Calamity Three. His goal: tip the cosmic scales to bring the Void crashing into the world and claim the place of power to which he believes he is owed. Loyalty is a flimsy commodity in Cocytus, and with Behemoth rushing from the celestial abyss to heed a distant call this small Texas town nestled somewhere between here and hell has no idea what’s in store."
All of Your Dreams Will Come True When You’re Dead
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Prologue
Cocytus was a town tucked somewhere in the folds of the never-ending blistering stretch of west Texas desert accessible only to those it chose to call, or rather poach. It was a town you could search for forever and never find or fall ass-backward into without realizing you were there. Of course, by then it’s too late. Some say all of your dreams come true when you’re dead. The same is said about going to Cocytus, only once there, you may as well be dead, because you’re as good as for sure.
Most succumb without resistance, heeding a call only they can discern. A frequency to which only they are tuned. These men are easily taken by darkness, their souls having rotted to fetid filth by the time they reached the place they’d been led, the option of redemption forever off the table upon arrival.
The town was called Cocytus, but that was just fancy talk for treachery. The place sucked men in faster than discounted pokes at the local whorehouse and burned them just as badly, only in a different kind of way. Women were taken there as well for different reasons, but none from Cochran.
The cowboys who set off for Cocytus whether by choice or by force were destined for the same fate. They’d be plugged into the grand design, or rather a grand design, as another cog churning the further perpetuation of darkness and the irresistible temptations offered as rewards for giving in.
The town’s run by a toothy-grinned, manipulative, son-of-a-bitch named Lycus who used a group of prickly snake bandits as enforcers named Luke, Samuel, and Paimon. They called themselves Calamity Three. He kept himself well insulated conducting the majority of his business by way of a young girl he’d turned into a conscious-less marauder of death called Alastor.
The Calamity Three were wanted in every settled state for multiple violent offences and constantly hunted by natives from the different tribes they’d slaughtered for no reason other than to kill. Their sole purpose was to destroy life and hope, to induce calamity by way of deployed chaos. They blazed an unstoppable path of havoc across the west with even the best and most seasoned Marshalls unable to bring them in. The fact they ended up in Cocytus with Lycus was destiny playing a cruel joke on every poor soul the three bandits wronged along their way because now, well, they were nearly invincible.
When Luke, Samuel and Paimon joined Lycus and Alastor, the darkest of energy fell across Cocytus, an energy that churned backwards against the current with enough force to change its direction. The three outlaws brought an edge with them that severed the remaining slippery strings of membrane keeping them attached to their present reality. Now, untethered from that world, the bandits slipped through murky quicksand-like ether right into Lycus’s control as he allowed them to straddle the line between planes.
The psychic calls started going out directly after the alliance, or at least that was when the men started hearing it. The ones who went easy, the weak ones, began arriving in Cocytus within days sliding seamlessly through an invisible slit smack in the middle of endless desert. The more who came, the farther the darkness was able to reach until there was nowhere it couldn’t go.
A small Texas town called Cochran was nestled on the edge of the panhandle where they chose to exist in an ignorance only partially feigned. The men from there who heeded the call all those years ago headed west straight for the desert, each and every one of them, but despite knowing this, not once had a search party been formed to go after them.
The Sheriff, for unknown reasons, was amongst the few men left untouched in the culling of Cochran, though no one knew what, if anything, made these men immune. Despite being unaffected, those left behind were too frightened to go after their friends and family members. They were afraid if they left it would happen to them, and they’d never return. When the Sheriff made the call to not go after the missing men, no one protested.
The people left in town, most of them women and children, did their best to go back to some semblance of normalcy, though the task wasn’t easy. The men who could work did their best to help with farming and other labor jobs necessary to keep the town going, but they were spread too thin. Many of the women of Cochran rose to the occasion of stepping in for their absent husband or father, but even that wasn’t enough to keep some places from falling into disrepair.
The first few years after the culling were hard, sad, and slow-going, heaping insult upon the injury of an already embittered people. After a few more years things were better, at least comparatively, with the people having finally settled into a relatively comfortable groove. The population had grown to a respectable amount again as a fair number of families were settling in Cochran, and soon the ruined fields became flourishing farms again under the care of new owners with plenty of hands to help.
Those left there during the incident existed with an unspoken agreement to forget about the culling, and to never never talk about it. Most of them still harbored their old superstitions, terrified that even mentioning what happened could somehow trigger a second round, one from which the town would not come back. It was something that in any other context would sound ridiculous or childish, but no one in Cochran dared put it to the test.
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