“It’s all here—
mind tricks, knife twists, and... the
Payback Parade.”

One flamboyant outlaw.

One dying
New Mexico town.

One ancient force hell-bent on stripping people of everything
that made them human.

Nat Gig had never belonged anywhere—except center stage.
A rhinestone-clad outlaw with a talent for misdirection, he built a legend from style, sabotage, and well-timed swagger.

But when he returned to Dry Gulch—a town that no longer embraced him—he found something far worse than rejection.

Years earlier, Nat had a vision—
the world bent, a whisper echoed, and something ancient stirred in his mind.
He dismissed it as nerves.
A moment.
He was wrong.

Dry Gulch wasn’t just corrupt—
it was infected.

Beneath its dust pulsed a vein of living ore that rewrote memory and reshaped those who came too close. At the center of this spreading threat stood Silas Finch, heir to a powerful bloodline and a man who moved through rooms like he already owned the floorboards.
He was Nat’s former mentor—
the first man he ever trusted,
and the first he vowed to kill while sober.

With the help of his closest friend Magda, a saloon-keeper with a penchant for arson, and Elias, an eerie man who grew up in a mine, Nat launched a five-stage war to reclaim Dry Gulch from the ore’s parasitic grip. They were joined by Marshal Kane and Sheriff Pinder, lawmen torn between orders and conscience, and a llama named Vengeance—
who answered to no one.

But the deeper Nat dug, the more the ore unearthed in him—
memories he’d buried, truths he’d rewritten, and a version of himself he might not survive becoming.

As the town turned into a mythic battleground, Nat had to choose whether to remain the man he’d always been—
or become the legend Dry Gulch needed.

“One hell of a show,
if you don’t mind bleeding during the encore.” —Nat Gig

Nat Gig would rather die on stage
than vanish into someone else’s myth.

Not All That Glitters is a 78,000-word Weird Western steeped in cosmic horror and dark theatrical folklore—a tale of resisting assimilation and preserving the unruly, fabulous mess of individuality in the face of an ancient, collective force. Shot through with glitter and grit, it explores the cost of sovereignty, and what it means to fight for the right to remain yourself—even when the world begs you to disappear.