When his mother forces him to kill an innocent man, Ephraim Cutler's quiet life in the Appalachian Mountains is thrown into turmoil. With a bounty on his head, Ephraim flees to the hills and hollers, where he discovers that his crime has drawn more than the law's attention - the Devil's in town with his eye on Ephraim's soul. Desperate to escape, Ephraim is torn between two clashing figures: an outcast granny doctor rumored to be a witch - and the local preacher.

Nathaniel King left New York City in 1828 to venture into the vast unexplored regions beyond Mississippi. He heads west, lured on by dreams of wealth based on his uncle's promise to share with him "the greatest treasure in the world".

In the first book of this brilliant series, Stephen King introduces listeners to one of his most powerful creations: Roland of Gilead, The Last Gunslinger. He is a haunting figure, a loner on a spellbinding journey into good and evil. In his desolate world, which frighteningly mirrors our own, Roland tracks The Man in Black, encounters an enticing woman named Alice, and begins a friendship with the boy from New York named Jake.

Mary Ingles was 23, happily married, and pregnant with her third child when Shawnee Indians invaded her peaceful Virginia settlement in 1755 and kidnapped her, leaving behind a bloody massacre. For months they held her captive. But nothing could imprison her spirit. With the rushing Ohio River as her guide, Mary Ingles walked one thousand miles through an untamed wilderness no white woman had ever seen.

The year is 1823, and the trappers of the Rocky Mountain Fur Company live a brutal frontier life. Hugh Glass is among the company's finest men, an experienced frontiersman and an expert tracker. But when a scouting mission puts him face-to-face with a grizzly bear, he is viciously mauled and not expected to survive. Two company men are dispatched to stay behind and tend to Glass before he dies. When the men abandon him instead, Glass is driven to survive by one desire: revenge.

When Wynn and Jack decide to canoe the Maskwa River in Northern Canada, they anticipate long days of leisurely paddling and picking blueberries and nights of stargazing and reading paperback Westerns. But a wildfire making its way across the forest adds unexpected urgency to the journey. When they hear a man and woman arguing on the fog-shrouded riverbank and decide to warn them about the fire, their search for the pair turns up nothing and no one. But: The next day, a man appears on the river, paddling alone. Is this the man they heard? And, if he is, where is the woman?

Tamsen Donner must be a witch. That is the only way to explain the series of misfortunes that have plagued the wagon train known as the Donner Party. Depleted rations, bitter quarrels, and the mysterious death of a little boy have driven the pioneers to the brink of madness. They cannot escape the feeling that someone—or something—is stalking them. Whether it was a curse from the beautiful Tamsen, the choice to follow an experimental route West, or just bad luck - the 90 men, women, and children of the Donner Party are at the brink of one of the deadliest adventures in history.

The blizzard hits out of nowhere, screaming across the Great Plains like a runaway train. Frostbite and hypothermia wait for anyone caught without shelter. For the hardy settlers of Far Enough, in the Montana Territory, it’s about to get worse. Something else has arrived with the blizzard - something sleek and savage and hungry. Wild animal or vengeful spirit from Native American legend, it blends into the snow and bites with sharper teeth than the wind. It is called the wanageeska. It is the White Death.

Brighty, a shaggy young burro, lives wild and free in the Grand Canyon of Arizona. He roams the steep cliffs with the squirrels and rabbits. But his favorite friend is Old Timer, the prospector who shares hot biscuits and calls him Bright Angel. One day Old Timer doesn't answer Brighty's loud "Eeeee-aw!" Instead, the friendly animal encounters a ruthless claim jumper. Will Brighty be able to bring the killer to justice and make the wilderness safe again?

There is Thorn, a shaman himself. He lives to pass down his wisdom and his stories - to teach those who would follow in his footsteps. There is Heather, the healer who, in many ways, holds the clan together. There is Elga, an outsider and the bringer of change. And then there is Loon, the next shaman, who is determined to find his own path. But in a world so treacherous, that journey is never simple - and where it may lead is never certain.

In the 1870s, Will Andrews, fired up by Emerson to seek "an original relation to nature," drops out of Harvard and heads west. He washes up in Butcher's Crossing, a small Kansas town full of restless men looking for ways to make money and ways to waste it. One of these men regales Will with tales of the immense buffalo herds hidden away in the Colorado Rockies and convinces him to join an expedition to track them down.

Callum, a seasoned horse thief at 15 years old, came to America from his native Ireland as an orphan. Ava, her father and brother lost to the war, hides in her crumbling home until Callum determines to rescue her from the bands of hungry soldiers pillaging the land, leaving destruction in their wake. Ava and Callum have only each other in the world and their remarkable horse, Reiver, who carries them through the destruction that is the South. Pursued relentlessly by a murderous slave hunter, tracking dogs, and rangers, the couple race through a beautiful but ruined land.

Western North Carolina, 1787. To escape a threatening stepfather and an unwanted marriage, Tamsen Littlejohn enlists the aid of Jesse Bird, a frontiersman she barely knows, to spirit her away from Morganton, North Carolina, west beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains. Trouble pursues, as the two men intent on seeing her recovered prove relentless in their hunt. Trouble awaits in the form of a divided frontier community.

Leaving their Pennsylvania home to forge a new life in the untamed Oregon Territory of 1845, the Colter family is ambushed by a kill-crazy gang of cutthroats on the Oregon Trail. Fifteen-year-old Tim Colter manages to escape and hide - only to return and find his parents butchered, his sisters Nancy and Margaret missing, and one last killer waiting for his return. Forced to fight for his life, the young Colter embarks on a perilous journey across a lawless frontier, hoping to save his sisters and salvage the dream they lived for.

The weird, wild west - an American frontier populated by gunslingers, rattlesnakes, outlaws, zombies, aliens, time travelers, and steampunk! Twenty-three of science fiction and fantasy's hottest and most popular authors create all-new tales, written exclusively for this anthology. Aliens and monsters, magic and science are introduced to the old west, with explosive results.