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.
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.
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