Pulp fiction is back!
If you're expecting to hear about a remake or sequel to Quentin Tarantino's movie...get the fuck outa here.
Alright, alright. No disrespect intended for Tarantino's 3rd or 4th best film, but I'm talking about Pulp fiction here! Stories of horror, mystery, the macabre, and high adventure. Tales of fantasy, dystopian futures, Space...the final frontier, legends, myths, sword and sorcery. Big muscled heroes, supermodel hot damsels, witches and sorcerer's, tyrants and devil's, outlaws, gunslingers, swordsmen...and women. Exotic landscapes, strange world's, deep caverns, high seas, castles and deserts and everything you or....more particularly, the sharpest minds in fiction could possibly imagine.
Historians and keepers of the chronicles will tell you in many a long and perhaps boring article, available anywhere on the internet that pulp fiction had it's heyday in the first half of the twentieth century. It's not hard for anybody to see that it's replacement had arrived in the form of an electronic box with a light up screen that displayed moving images, and now the people would no longer have to use their imaginations to conjure the images from print on a page to a movie in the mind. Hollywood would do the lifting for them.
Well fuck that. The movie machine has produced some solid entertainment, no doubt, but they've also managed to muck up nearly 99 percent of the stories they've tried to adapt.
But I'm not here to talk about Hollywood shortcomings. Though one could certainly give them some credit for helping create the current demand for old school fiction. The recent wave of politically correct story lines, with carefully curated diverse casts, plotlines carefully examined and tested to make sure they don't offend anyone....except the people who are just looking for some goddamn entertainment have driven audiences away from their wall sized small screens and back to the printed page. They don't want a "woke" political sermon or a rewritten history lesson. They want goddamn! Entertainment. Intrigue, and mystery, and violence and squamous monsters that the mind rejects. They want Robert E. Howard, and H.P. Lovecraft, and Jack London, and Manly Wade Wellman, and Karl Edward Wagner, Roger Zelazney, and Edgar Rice Burrows.
The people want short, fast fiction stories that they can read in one sitting, on a lunch break or before dinner....but all these great icons of pulp fiction are dead.
But the idea lives on. The style and the feel are still there, and there are new talented writers rising to the challenge, taking up the pen and writing the mighty sword into existence with it. Fiction for the people.
Not only did I just discover that Weird Tales is back in business, the most iconic, and famous pulp fiction mag of all, but there are a few new kids on the block breaking it out old school.
First and foremost....
"The Bizarchives" brought to you courtesy of an ambitious bloke, name of Dave Martel and his band of merry men and aspiring pulp fiction creators.
I ordered their first issue just a couple of weeks back and just started bending pages. Obviously back in the 'Golden era' of pulp fiction, the words 'weird' and 'strange' had already been paired with every possible pseudonym for story and trademarked by publishers trying to grab a slice of the action, so Dave had to get somewhat creative and make up a word. 'Bizzarchives'! It's catchy. It's cool. And it sells no doubt about it. It also describes the contents perfectly.
I was not unimpressed. In fact, to be honest I was expecting something a little inferior. The Cover art seemed a little too bright for my taste with more colors then a gay pride flag, but I found myself liking it more and more the longer I studied it. A library full of books with monsters, and ghosts, and wizards flowing out of them as if into the readers mind. I even looked at some hot chicks in bikinis just to make sure I wasn't turning just a little gay. Nope the art was good. Respect to Donald Kent?
Now the stories? Surely none of the old weird/strange...tales, stories, yarns, could possibly have had this much variety of stories. Several stories of cosmic horrors. Very Lovecraft like though with entirely different storytelling. That is to say the writers did not depend on 'squamous', and 'his mind rejected it' to describe the monstrosities. A couple of somewhat comedic modern setting fantasies combining firearms and elves and dragons. Celtic legends come to life, a couple of futuristic space age sci-fi stories, the old 'man vs machine war', and probably the most memorable story of all by the editor himself, Dave Martel, A story called Lex and the Lost Girl.
Spoiler alert. Not memorable for the quality of the writing. In fact I would guess Dave threw it together in about an hour as a joke. But it just got me chuckling with the total crude bluntness of the plot and character. The main character is a giant, plate armored, steroid muscled behemoth of a man named Lucious Lex. I couldn't read the story without seeing the pro wrestler Lex Luger as the character. A young woman gets mauled by a monster in the woods. Lex steps in, and in a graphic scene of mayhem proceeds to disembowel and dismember the monster. He then busts out some convenient healing magic on the not quite dead girl, tells her "I am a monster to the monsters just as they are to you." He then throws her over his shoulder like a freshly killed deer carcass and caries her back to her farm, where he breaks her brothers nose and steals their cart horse before riding off into the sunset to kill more monsters. I can only hope there are more of these in the subsequent issues.
Anyway, with an entry product this good I'd guess it will be no time before Dave and his fellow editors come to know the true satisfaction of fiction publishing. That is to say reading through the legion of story submissions and sending out politely cruel rejection emails. But.... the more milk in the pail the more quality cream to skim off the top. I'm sure this will be quite apparent, if Hollywood doesn't have them assassinated.
So if you like pulp fiction, grab a copy of bizarchives. It's on Amazon. Only 10 bucks. I'm heading there myself to grab #2