James Grauerholz has called the triad Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983), and The Western Lands the "Red Night trilogy."

This differentiates it from the Space Age trilogy and suggests coherence among the books. The self-drawn character of Kim Carsons appears for the first time in the Wild Boys series as Audrey Carsons, but while all of these books have some important interrelationships, they are sufficiently independent to stand on their own.