Short Stories/Novellas

A Texas Ranger is hunting a killer in a snowstorm where nothing is as it seems. Not even the woman….

ALL THE PULP WESTERN ROMANCE AND VIOLENCE OF YESTERYEAR MADE NEW AGAIN BY MEAN PETE PRESS! In this first of a new series of spicy pulp western stories (roughly 50 printed pages) written exclusively as ebooks by Peter Brandvold and published by his own Mean Pete Press, the Rio Concho Kid must save a young Mexican girl from the savage intentions of the lusty General Constantine San Gabriel, who forced her into marriage. On their wedding night, Tomasina De La Cruz sticks a stiletto in the General’s guts and flees his sprawling hacienda with the help of the half-Apache drifter, Johnny Navarro, a.k.a., “the Rio Concho Kid.” The Kid and Tomasina race toward a rendezvous with the young man to whom Tomasina’s heart really belongs. In so doing, Tomasina and the Kid must avoid a deadly trap set by the man whom the dishonored General hired to bring his young bride back so he could have her tortured and gunned-down by firing squad. That man is the infamous, deadly bounty killer known only as El Leproso, the Leper! Can the Kid prove victorious over his fiercest enemy and avoid falling in love with Tomasina, who is as beguiling as she is beautiful but who also harbors a bizarre, bone-chilling secret?

SEXY SOUTHERN-GOTHIC HORROR! An all-new, ebook-exclusive backwoods horror story from Mean Pete Press! Devlin had retreated to her family’s cabin in the Georgia woods to be alone with her thoughts. She’d had a tough time of it, breaking up with Johnny Bascomb after enduring his verbal and physical abuse, after losing their baby. But when Devlin hears screams of bloody murder originating from the woods across the pond, she heads out to investigate and finds herself being hunted by the ghost of a Confederate soldier, freshly home from the Civil War... The girl’s mouth moved for a time before she managed to get the words out: “He’s...torturin’...’em.” She had a heavy backwoods accent. Devlin drew a sharp breath, steeled herself against the fear racing through her. “Who...?” “My family. He’s torturin’ ‘em. He’s home from the war...and he found out about....” Tears oozed out of the girl’s pain-racked eyes to stream through the blood on her cheeks. Her hands made wet squishing sounds, and Devlin realized she was trying to hold her insides in. She’d been shot or stabbed. A man’s muffled shout rose like thunder from inside the cabin. “Oh, god!” the girl cried, her face twisting with anguish and horror as she threw her head back and raged at the sky. “It’s Johnny! He’s home from the war an’ he’s killin’ us all!”

AN EBOOK EXCLUSIVE ALL-ACTION WESTERN SHORT-STORY FROM PETER BRANDVOLD AND MEAN PETE PRESS! The outlaw Chet Villanova has gunned down his entire gang including his girl, the beautiful Delores. All the loot from their last robbery is his. He's headed to Mexico with nearly thirty thousand dollars in his saddlebags--a very rich man indeed. Rich, mean, and well-armed. What...or who...could possibly stand in his way?

ANOTHER WILD, SEXY, VIOLENT WESTERN STORY FROM PETER BRANDVOLD AND HIS OWN MEAN PETE PRESS! Colter Farrow has been through a lot. He’s killed a lot of men in self-defense. Now the red-haired young gunfighter with the Mark of Satan on his cheek is on the dodge, trying to outrun the bounty hunters and get himself to Mexico. But then he runs into a beautiful young woman with the unlikely name of Kyle Bruner. Kyle is transporting her dead outlaw brother for burial. The trouble is, Kyle’s brother is wanted dead or alive. Bounty hunters are after him, too. Colter falls under the girl’s haunting spell. He’d best make sure he doesn’t fall too hard...because sometimes love can be more deadly than bullets. “Thank you, Colter,” Kyle said. “You might be hell with a six-gun, but you’re damn sweet.”

In the tradition of John Steinbeck and Kent Haruf… A literary short story about an old man's fight to save his farmyard from a noxious weed…and to save himself and those he loves from Old Mortality…. From the story: But he didn't see himself as old. Old was Mrs. Halvorssen, Lloyd's mother-in-law, who had lived out here with Lloyd and Marion during the last ten years of her life. Her black shoes and hair like bleached cornsilk. Old was men sitting on cafe stools, buying each other coffee through an afternoon, oblivious to the world passing beyond the win¬dow other than to note the weather. It was men after church with broad, bony, age-stained hands clamped to canes, guided up the porch steps of a neighbor's house for coffee and rhubarb bread. They died in their sleep or in the bathroom, and their funerals were tedious affairs, with few tears. Mornings before the alarm went off Lloyd still dreamed of not hav¬ing his homework finished and being called on to say who wrote Julius Caesar in Mrs. Stanley's English class. He dreamed of his father's quick-stepping walk and admonishing eyebrows, and being late with chores. He dreamed of picking juneberries hot mornings with Rosalee Burback when he was nine and so in love his ears rang. Deep down he was still that same boy. Little had changed—until he looked in the mirror or became winded from an evening walk to the railroad spur.