Jangles & Drake: Hopping Mad at Iron Bend

Lori Drake is a dragoneer, a pilot-for-hire whose mount just happens to breathe fire and have strong opinions about his meals. When an old friend sends a desperate telegram from a remote railroad camp, Lori and her dragon Jangles fly out expecting a straightforward monster hunt.

What they find is worse.

The workers are hollow-eyed and silent, their emotions crushed flat by something no one can name. Engineers are turning up dead, drained, withered, their lives sucked clean. Every morning, someone else is gone. And out on the dark plains to the south, something is hopping through the grass.

Someone is raising the Jiangshi, hopping vampires out of Xilongese legend, and using them as a workforce to mine something ancient and terrible from the great butte that towers over the camp. Something powerful enough to twist the land itself.

With a sheltered young sorceress who has never left her father's shop, a railroad engineer hiding a secret that could get him hanged, and a dragon who just wants to be appreciated, Lori is about to learn that the real monster isn't the undead.

It's whoever built them.

Hopping Mad at Iron Bend is a weird west fantasy horror story set in a world of dragons, thunderbirds, gremlins, and dark sorcery, where the frontier is stranger than anyone admits, and a smart pilot always knows when to quit.