Mayhem Sam Vol. II Cover Reveal: Hell Comes Home to Sweet Pine

Reality is broken, Lincoln walks, and Mayhem Sam is heading home.

Mayhem Sam Vol. II | J.D. Graves | Dead Sky Publishing

The western has always had a horror story buried under it, and the splatter western is the form that finally dug it up. This Mayhem Sam Vol. II cover reveal brings J.D. Graves back into that territory, but first it is worth walking the ground his heroine rides across. It is rough country. The gunmen were never heroes, the preachers carried guns, and the hunger that drove the wagons west never really went away.

Horror writers have been saying so for forty years. Joe R. Lansdale raised the dead in Mud Creek with Dead in the West in 1986. Cormac McCarthy sent the Glanton gang across the border in Blood Meridian. The anthology Women of the Weird West shows writers still fight over that ground in 2026. So here is the scene, then the synopsis, then the cover, in the latest of our horror features on Ginger Nuts of Horror.

The frontier was always a horror story waiting for someone honest enough to tell it. Mayhem Sam Vol. II sets out to tear reality open so that the outlaws, the preachers and the dead all ride the same broken road home, and the people telling the story start rewriting it as they go.

The Western’s Oldest Sins: Outlaws, Zealots and the Hungry Dead

Strip the romance off the western and three figures are left standing in the dust. The outlaw. The zealot. The hungry dead. They are everything the old western spent a century trying to bury. Horror has spent decades digging them back up.

Start with the outlaws. The classic western loved its gunmen as lone romantics, more sinned against than sinning. Horror never bought it. McCarthy’s Glanton gang are scalp hunters paid by the head. Blood Meridian reads far closer to a Bosch panel than a John Wayne picture. In a horror western the outlaw is not the man on the wanted poster. He is the reason the poster exists.

The greedy zealot may be the figure horror understands best. Robert Mitchum’s Harry Powell in The Night of the Hunter (1955) has LOVE and HATE on his knuckles and stolen money on his mind. He scares us because his scripture is a crowbar. Lansdale turned the type inside out in Dead in the West. His gunslinging Reverend Jebediah Mercer is the man who stands between Mud Creek and the dead. Faith out west, in these tales, is a gun or a con. Quite often it is both.

Then the cannibals. Antonia Bird’s Ravenous (1999) and S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk (2015) both knew that hunger drove the frontier. Manifest Destiny was always an appetite. The splatter western made that literal. Death’s Head Press launched its Splatter Western line in 2020 with Wile E. Young’s The Magpie Coffin. Kristopher Triana’s The Thirteenth Koyote rode out in the same first run.

The fair complaint about the form is that it can turn into a gore delivery system in a cowboy hat. It swaps McCarthy’s moral weight for a body count, and plenty of readers come for exactly that. The more interesting books treat the gore as only half the plan. The other half is the question the old western never asked out loud: who gets to tell the story of the West, and what happens when the dead start to edit it?

That is the road Samantha Jakes is riding.

What Is Mayhem Sam Vol. II About?

Graves brought Sam into the splatter western in 2024 with Mayhem Sam. It was a revenge story set just after the Civil War. It ran through Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado. The sequel tears the world open and lets the dead back in. Here is the official synopsis from Dead Sky Publishing.

With reality ripped apart, Samantha Jakes—the myth, the legend herself—has no choice but to head for home: Sweet Pine. Determined to stay alive after unleashing the cataclysm and haunted by sinister apparitions, Sam must navigate a Boschian hellscape of murderous outlaws, greedy zealots, and hordes of undead cannibals. But when Mayhem Sam crosses paths with a troupe of actors, their play—Tombstone Joan—unnerves her.

With the fabric of reality ripped asunder, facts are no longer facts and truths can change. If Lincoln is dead, what is he doing stalking the South for his would-be assassin? And if dead men don’t remain buried, what does that mean for Sam and her bloody past? Mayhem Sam Vol. II is not only the sequel to one of the most notorious splatter westerns, but a canon shot across time and space.

Read that and all three of the western’s old sins turn up in one line. Murderous outlaws. Greedy zealots. Hordes of undead cannibals. The word Boschian lands hard after Blood Meridian.

A troupe of actors, a play that bends a legend, a dead president who will not stay dead: this sounds like a book that wants the gore and the argument. That fits the man writing it. Graves came to the novel from the stage. A playwright who puts a play inside his western is telling you where he thinks the trouble starts.

Which leaves one question the synopsis does not answer. Is Tombstone Joan secretly based on our own reviewer, Tom B. Stone? The name is close enough to make a lawyer twitch. I leave that one for Graves to deny.

Sam is heading home. Given what Sweet Pine did to her the first time, home is the most frightening word in that whole synopsis.

The Mayhem Sam Vol. II Cover Reveal

J.D. Graves is an award-winning film producer, author and playwright. He lives in East Texas, behind what the region calls the Pine Curtain. His stage work has travelled far beyond it. His play Tall Pines Lodge was selected for the New York International Fringe Festival and for FronteraFEST in Austin, and his later play Stanley and Jim premiered at the Manhattan Rep Theatre. Reviewers have called him the Shakespeare of Pulp.

His crime and mystery short stories have run in Black Mask, Mystery Weekly, Tough, Switchblade and Pulp Modern: Hand of Doom. His first novel, Mayhem Sam, came out on 17 September 2024 from Death’s Head Press, part of Dead Sky Publishing. It brought Samantha Jakes into the splatter western. Mayhem Sam Vol. II marks her return. You can find more of his work on his website.

About Dead Sky Publishing

Dead Sky Publishing launched in March 2022 under Stygian Sky Media, which publisher Jarod Barbee and author Jeremy Wagner set up in 2021. It began with graphic novels and comics, with the letterer and artist Steve Wands as co-owner. It now carries Death’s Head Press, the extreme horror imprint Barbee founded with Patrick C. Harrison III in 2018. Death’s Head Press is the home of the Splatter Western books. The first run of thirteen opened with The Magpie Coffin in 2020.

Mayhem Sam Vol. II is published by Dead Sky Publishing