Returning to his hometown, Shirley Jackson Award-nominated and Bram Stoker Award®-winning writer and editor Michael Bailey fills in the missing pieces of a town’s dark past in this homage to Charles Portis’ True Grit and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Based on a true story, Hangtown is a historical western about the hangings in a placer mining town that once went by that moniker, one of the first established diggings during the chaos of the Gold Rush. Set in 1848 to 1850, the unlawful were punished and hanged swiftly for crimes of theft and violence, haunting forever what is now Placerville, California. “With testimonies revealed in the whisper of oilskin, stolen from beneath wooden floorboards, or drawn with a finger in the dirt, Bailey unearths a bloody tale [a collection of bloody tales] that seep(s) truth like an open wound. Mining themes of avarice, prejudice, injustice, and told in prose as blunt as a shovel, Bailey hits paydirt with Hangtown. A veritable tour de force.” – Lee Murray, five-time Bram Stoker Award®-winning author