Welcome, Hailey!

Hailey Piper is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Queen of Teeth, Cruel Angels Past Sundown, A Light Most Hateful, The Worm and His Kings series, and other books of dark fiction. She is an active member of the Horror Writers Association, with words appearing in Library Journal, CrimeReads, Tor Nightfire, Pseudopod, Vastarien, and various other publications. She lives with her wife in Maryland, where their occult rituals are secret. 

About Cruel Angels Past Sundown

New Mexico Territory, 1882: She comes to the Klein ranch at sunset, a strange naked pregnant woman dragging a cavalry saber. Annette Klein and her husband have built peace between their marriage and secret relations beyond, but their serenity dies in bloodshed tonight through a cannibalistic demon and a mad preacher.

Annette barely escapes the bloodbath to the nearby town of Low’s Bend. where she might find safety with friends, but hell is at her heels. If she’s going to survive until dawn, she’ll have to forget everything she knows about peace and mercy, and face a hollow malevolence more ancient and ruthless than she’s ever imagined.

Interview with Hailey Piper

Tell us about yourself – what is something readers would be surprised to find out? 

Hi, I’m Hailey Piper! I write horror and dark fiction that’s queer, weird, and full of feelings. My horror western Cruel Angels Past Sundown is my ninth published book. As for what might surprise people, I have such a hard time perceiving myself through others. Oh, I might have one—a bunch of people who follow me on social media see me reference the 1989 movie Society a lot think it’s my favorite movie apparently? It is not. Not top 10. Not even top 50. But there’s no other movie like it and I think everyone should see it at least once.

What is it about the Weird West genre that draws you to it? What are your favorite aspects or examples of this often-underappreciated genre?

Weird West is an interesting means of reexamining the tropes of the western and explore them with a strange edge. It’s also fun if you’re into those aesthetics, elements, the time period. That was definitely the initial draw for me as a fan of Sergio Leone’s Italian westerns when I was younger. One of my favorite aspects though, and what really makes Weird West important to me, is that the fantastical elements shed light on the western genre proper as being largely horseshit. What many people have accepted as factual is a myth, the western stories and films being inaccurate to their time and setting, meaning the “mundane” version of the western is already a skewed never-was. That level of liminality, or even unreality, makes it fertile ground for greater strangeness, which Weird West plants in abundance.

What inspired you to write this story?

Cruel Angels Past Sundown originally had a different title and altogether different story. I sat down to write a weird horror western with a mind to follow some of the regular westerns I enjoyed, with a handful of characters as sometimes competing/sometimes cooperating bounty hunters like in For a Few Dollars More or even Cowboy Bebop. But the story became too stiff, the characters too weighed-down by roles that didn’t suit them, and after a couple months and a few chapters, I pivoted away and started over. I had to ask myself what I would want since I could do anything. So I wrote a standalone chapter with a couple characters in new roles, and this became the seed for a greater story, bringing back the other characters in different ways, expanding on a new story centering Annette Klein and the town of Low’s Bend as they face an ancient order to the world and the preacher Balthazar Wilcox, who would see his own morality inflicted on all who live. But at least one character, Gloria Travers, did hold onto being a bounty hunter!

If you were living in the Weird West, what kind of character would you be?

That’s a hard question. With Weird West not being a single setting, it’s hard to imagine consistency between those with magic elements, or steampunk, or cosmic horror, etc. If I’m being honest, whatever the setting, I see myself cleaning things up. It isn’t glamorous, but without people who care about hygiene and sanitation, disease and death overcome society, and there won’t be anyone to act as frontier witches and robot gunslingers or anything else we come up with.

Are there any other writing projects you’re working on?

A couple projects. I’m dancing between some short stories I owe a few editors through the rest of the year while figuring out things for the next book, something for 2025. Hopefully I’ll be starting it proper before the year is out. I’m also working on edits for a couple of my 2024 releases. 

What are you reading right now?

Right now I’m having an amazing time with the audiobook for Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. It’s a mix of haunting and exciting, with stories of a cursed movie and a sorcery-infused film reel, and I think it might be my favorite of her books yet, though that’s hard to say since I really enjoyed last year’s The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, and her first book/my first read of hers, Signal to Noise, grabbed me by the heart.

Favorite weird west movie/book/comic/etc. and why?

Oh, that’s tough! I would have to go with the ‘90s anime Trigun. It’s alternatingly fun and devastating, and amid the western aesthetics and functions of the setting, there’s so much sci-fi weirdness between juiced-up berserkers, mad science, futuristic ruins, and so on. You never know what to expect.

Anything else you’d like to add about writing or the Weird West (tips, etc.)?

I try to think up different advice for questions like this, but really there are only so many general useful tips. There’s no secret formula, no matter how many people will say there is (and inevitably charge money to explain it to you, as if that can help). Deep down, write what you want. Keep writing what you want. Practice and feedback will help you get better at conveying your thoughts to others, and the more you write, the more you get to know yourself and can better understand what you want to write. At least, until you get older and have different desires and a different self. There is no perfect mastery, like there is no perfect age or perfect self. There’s only learning and getting better over time, and hopefully an understanding of how to trust yourself, your readers, and your willingness to bring something bizarre into the world.

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