Let Us Now Praise the New Literature

The Arbo Files

David Goodis, pulp writer – ThePulp.Net

Look. Let’s just be blunt. Contemporary literature stinks like one of Baudelaire’s dead whores. You know the kind of lit I’m talking about — hardcover originals penned by Iowa or Ivy League grads burning all our collective ears with dreck about bad sex, bad political takes, and bad people. These are the books that get lauded by the established press in New York. These are the books that win awards. Conversely, these are the books that nobody reads.

Genre fiction is not safe from this miasma either. For decades now, science fiction, fantasy, and horror have marched lockstep with our awful zeitgeist that prioritizes the author, especially their immutable characteristics, over story. Quality suffers across the board, no matter if you are digging through the Target bargain bin or killing time at Barnes & Noble. Instead of turtles, it’s all suck all the way down.

But, outside of the well-guarded walls of acceptable literature, lurks a shadow force of rounders, rejects, and, most importantly, writers. These wordsmiths often use nom de guerres to isolate their clandestine activities from the Penguin/Random House Stasi. Most do not have headshots or agents. They are pure freelancers — wandering ronin on the lit landscape busy characterizing and cataloging the dystopia that they see. Some write like the pulpsters here at The Bizarchives. Others are a little more high-brow and hi-falutin’. In the end, it is all gravy, for the following scribes are doing the Lord’s work by writing good fiction for hungry audiences. And they are doing it without help from anyone except a small but growing circle of independent and dissident publishers dedicated to disseminating dangerous art in an antiseptic world.

A real quick apology to the PULP KVLT before we get started. This article will not feature any of the Bizarchives veterans or the new blood that can be found in issue four. This is not to say that these guys are not great. They are great. Rather, the point here is to expose our readership to like-minded authors outside of Dave Martel’s citadel of the weird.

Now, with that introduction dead and done with, let’s get on with the show.

Beyond Your Imagination: An Interview with Mencius Moldbugman (terrorhousepress.com)

Some of you might read the name “Mencius Moldbugman” and groan. Others might not get the joke at all. Put simply, Mencius Moldbugman is kind of an inside joke for the online right-wing. The name is a parody of “Mencius Moldbug,” the old pseudonym of neo-reactionary darling, Curtis Yarvin. The name also invokes the image of the “bugman,” the stock caricature of the effete urbanite male who leaks soy instead of sweat. This year, Mencius Moldbugman compounded the joke even further by naming his first book, Unsqualified Preservations, which is a clear parody of Unqualified Reservations, Moldbug/Yarvin’s influential blog.

Do not delude yourself into thinking that Moldbugman is either a knock-off or an extended lampoon, however. This unknown British gentleman is a far superior writer to Moldbug, and is indeed one of the best writers in the contemporary world. Unsqualified Preservations is a darkly comical, but ultimately horrific look at modern society. The book’s tempo is set immediately by the multi-layered horror of “Rickadoodle Applestrudel.” In this short story, the narrator slowly becomes a major Internet troll of the titular YouTuber, who specializes in obscene mukbang performances. The fact that the obese YouTuber happens to be the narrator’s relative makes the story all the more tragic.

Unsqualified Preservations explores other contemporary maladies, as well, from the horrors of leftist surveillance in the office in “Human Capital” to immigrant rape gangs in “More Than Just a Housemate.” The short story collection focuses quite a bit on the unique terrors of China, too. Moldbugman makes clear in the introduction that he has spent a considerable amount of time in China, plus he was involved in translating The Flock of Ba-Hui, a collection of deeply Lovecraftian tales written by an anonymous Chinese author. As such, Moldbugman writes with some authority when he mocks the conformity of the CCP bureaucracy in “Dinner Party,” or when he exposes the corruption and cynicism of mid-level functionaries in “Dumplings.” Moldbugman also tips his hat (hopefully not a fedora) to his Chinese-Lovecraft roots with “Nadir,” a Lovecraftian weird tale set in the industrial hellscape that is urban China.

Owing to pervasive doxxing threats, Moldbugman seems to have retired his pen. This is a shame beyond measure. However, if Unsqualified Preservations is his only present to us, then what a present it is. Few books better summarize our current predicament quite like this one. Read it and live it.

Story for your enjoyment: “Leftover Women”

Detective Wolfman (@Det_Wolfman) / Twitter

A self-described “hardboiled loner who’s loved by the moon,” Detective Wolfman is primarily a podcaster and old school-style DJ who runs his own music program called ON THE BEAT with Detective Wolfman. The Wolfman is also one helluva good writer too. One of his best yarns, “Heartsfire,” appeared in the fifth issue of Raw Egg Nationalist’s amazing Man’s World magazine. A swashbuckling fantasy with a similar feel to Dave Martel’s Lex tales, “Heartsfire” follows the wandering hero Young Lad and his companion Mutt as they rid a wayward village of great evil. Young Lad swings a mighty sword, and “Heartsfire” is sure to light a flame in the heart of any red-blooded man.

As can be gleaned from his pen name, Detective Wolfman feels especially comfortable in the noir genre. His best work in this genre appeared in the Summer of the Shark special by Apocalypse Confidential, a “psy-op sleaze rage” that specializes in fringe-type pulp. Wolfman’s entry in the special, “Hammerhead,” is one of the best noir tales ever written, and arguably one of the very best written since the 1950s. The story follows Kim Mal-chin, a South Korean vice detective battling cirrhosis of the liver. '“Hammerhead” sees the sick and spiritually jaundiced cop go to war with Incheon’s Chinese triads. The story has all the familiar hallmarks of hardboiled fiction, but the deeper it goes into the murky waters of the underworld, the more depraved it becomes.

Detective Wolfman may not yet have an extensive catalog, but what he does have on offer is better than some entire oeuvres. The Wolfman is writing more stories as we speak, so keep an eye on him, especially when the moon is full.

Read “Hammerhead” here.

Conan, Esq (@conan_esq) / Twitter

Conan, Esq., also known as Alexander Palacio, is a prolific poster on Twitter. His best threads are viral takedowns of the sacred cows of the fantasy and science fiction world. Mr. Conan is also a good friend of the Bizarchives and a champion of independent literature. Such a position must come easy for him, as Conan, Esq. also happens to be one of the best sword & sorcery working. His Ashes of the Urn series is a must-read for anyone perusing this essay.

The first book in the series, The Turquoise Serpent, introduces readers to the warlord Cayucali. Set in medieval Mesoamerica, The Turquoise Serpent deals with Cayucali’s imprisonment in Kalak Mool, a city of snake worshippers previously thought to be abandoned. To escape his chains and to return to his own city, Cayucali reluctantly joins forces with an apprentice wizard named Tezca. The pair fight their way out of Kalak Mool, do damage to the city-state’s royal house, and make out for the imposing jungle. The Flowers of the Moon picks up where the previous novel ends, and it sees Cayucali and Tezca through even more fatal encounters with enemy warriors and jungle monsters.

Cayucali is a true heir to Robert E. Howard’s Conan. Both personify the hulking and brooding warrior archetype well. Plus, Palacio writes like a student of Howard, with lean and sparse prose that prioritizes action over exposition. He needs to come to the Bizarchives stat. There is no time to spare!

H.P. Lovecraft is the undisputed master of weird fiction. His name is synonymous with Weird Tales, pulp fiction, cosmic horror, and so much more. Zero H.P. Lovecraft is synonymous with telling women to lose weight. I jest, for Zero H.P. is one of the kings of dissident literature. His work is science fiction and cosmic horror of an intellectual quality that far surpasses anything that has won a Hugo Award in the last twenty years. Despite his namesake, Zero H.P.’s fiction is quite distinct for Lovecraft’s. Zero H.P. does not deal with cosmic monstrosities or cults or hereditary taints. Rather, his fiction is all about the deep, dark Internet, the perversities of money, technology, and work, and the increasingly cyclopean society of all-consuming socio-political uniformity. “The Gig Economy” starts out as a mystery tale about working strange online gigs for money, but it eventually becomes a philosophical treatise about madness and money. “Don’t Make Me Think” is a tale told in emojis about infantilizing technocracy and the daily tortures it performs on the living. “Slay, Queen” is a story better left unsaid.

Zero H.P.’s prose is purple, but in a way unlike the O.G. Lovecraft. Rather than Anglophilic adjectives, Zero H.P. adorns his writing with jargon lifted from Silicon Valley, quantum mechanics, and other big-brained spheres. His pulp is thinking man’s pulp, and it is the furthest thing from disposable. Zero H.P. is so thoroughly hated because he is so obviously better than 99-percent of writers working in the science fiction and horror genres. And whether he wants to admit it or not, Zero H.P. is the leader of his own Lovecraft Circle of sorts, with many Twitter anons and online writers gravitating to his work and socio-political standpoints. This is no mere cult-of-personality, and Zero H.P. is a benevolent ruler anyway, having dedicated time and effort to the first Passage Prize contest for art and literature. Such work is emblematic of our literary movement, where artists, reviewers, and fans all do their part to proselytize the new good words.

These four authors are far from the only ones. T.R. Hudson, Dan Baltic, and many others are also publishing exquisite additions to the growing canon of unbelievably based lit. These authors are helped by an array of equally awesome publications like Aegeon, DMR Books, and many others. There are also far too many SubStack accounts and blogs and social media accounts to name but suffice it to say that the ecosystem for dissident lit is growing by leaps and bounds. This is not a good thing; it is a great thing. It is a necessary thing. We have established a culture of our own that is completely independent of trash world. A reader today can go years without ever having to pick up a mainstream novel for lack of anything else to read, and that is all thanks to writers like the ones covered here and readers like you.

So keep reading, you filthy animals.