Now Reading

Godzilla's Witnesses

Pulp Friction

I love pulp fiction.

Maybe I should rephrase that. I love the idea of pulp fiction. Let’s face it: a lot of the stuff we call pulp fiction was pretty bad, cranked out to meet a tight deadline and earn a low wage.

But there were a lot of gems hidden in that mountain of turds, especially if you’re in the right frame of mind when you read the stuff. I know this because I’ve had quite a few friends say, “What’s the big deal with The Shadow/Doc Savage/The Spider, etc.?” I pass along some samples. Occasionally, the new reader becomes a fan. Often, they do not. In fact, they sometimes violently do not become a fan. So take what I’m saying with a big grain of salt. I’m a fan. I love the stuff.  Your mileage may vary.

New Pulp is the genre of current pulp fiction, written to emulate the tone or style or campiness of the original pulp. I’ve read a lot of it. Heck, I’ve written some of it (I even have a pulp project on my to-do list). Some of the New Pulp is great. Some of it is not. The New Pulp I’ve read includes its fair share of bad writing and bad editing (or, I suspect, no editing).

Having said that, this caught my eye today.

Here’s the link to read more or to order.
 
The editors have a good pedigree and that may be enough for me to check it out. If that happens. I’ll review it here. On the other hand, I have a lot of old pulp fiction left to be read, and I plan to knock out some of that over the summer. For some reason summer time always means pulp time for me.

Catching Up (Part 1)

Hey. Long time, no blog. Things have been busy, as usual. But a recent renovation job at the house threw the schedule waaaay off. It’s amazing how construction at a small house like ours can become all-encompassing. But it’s over now and we have beautiful new floor to ceiling bookshelves, which will finally help organize our out-of-control book collection. This will make it far easier to see what we have, what we want to keep, and what we want to discard, probably through Goodwill. Here’s one of the shelves, partly stocked.

Here’s another, with our cat Callie in the background, holding the bed down.

Over the Memorial Day weekend, between stints at work, I read the new Steve Berry novel The Lincoln Myth. Berry writes a fast-paced thriller, with a plot drawn from American history, in this case a deal between Brigham Young and Abraham Lincoln to keep the Union intact during the Civil War. In the present day, former intelligence agent Cotton Malone has to stop the centerpiece of the Lincoln deal from becoming public and destroying America. I always think of Berry’s novels as “Da Vinci Code-lite”. And, as Martha Stewart wisely puts it, that’s a good thing.

For those who are politically inclined, here’s an article from Damon Linker where he examines why he’s not a Republican anymore (but he’s not really a Democrat, either).