No Man's Land: The Black Market Fiction Print Issue
The commercial market spent twenty years declaring the Western dead. Indie writers kept writing them anyway.
This is the June 2026 issue of Black Market Fiction, an independent fiction magazine for readers tired of what the big publishers are selling. The Western issue collects four original stories plus two editorial features that frame what the genre is doing now.
Inside this issue:
- The Ballad of the Surviving Western by Managing Editor Tia Ja'Nae. An introduction tracing how the Western survived the gatekeepers who tried to bury it and the revisionists who tried to sanitize it.
- Blood-Red Pass by Michah Murray. A bounty hunter rides into a pass that earned its name.
- Unrepentant: Origin by AJ Rhino. A boy rides home from a hunt to find his world in ashes and the road south leading to hell.
- The Man in Back: Bone Tomahawk's Real Hero by Editor-in-Chief Kristin McTiernan. A defense of John Brooder as the actual moral center of the film.
- The Hidden Sea of the Ophir Mine by David Hardy. A Comstock-era mining operation uncovers something older than the men who dug it.
- He Who Rides the Pale Horse by Jake Vandenberg. A horse-breaker takes on the one bronco no man has stayed on, and discovers what the horse really is.
The West, the way readers who never stopped loving it still want it.
