Fluffy

Here's an inspired approach to creating a limited-edition version of a book. Commendably angry publishers OR Books recently published a collection of noted awful film-maker Ed Wood's pulp short stories, Blood Spatters Quickly.

 

Among many other notable traits, Wood was also a cross-dresser, particularly obsessed with wearing fluffy pink angora jumpers (or 'sweaters', for the Americans in the audience)--see his early movie Glen or Glenda, which heavily fictionalised his own experiences and in which he played the lead...

..and so it's rather wonderful that the special edition of this book comes with its own fluffy pink jumper.

What are the stories like? Pretty much as you might imagine, only even more mad and padded and inept. As an example, the opener, Scream Your Bloody Head Off, which is accompanied by this entirely apt bit of artwork...

..begins like this:

'She was going to send him to the cemetery. He knew that from the moment he saw her flying at him, that knife gleaming over her head.

'It was bitter cold and the blizzard had been grinding across the land for more than two days and there didn’t appear to be any letting up and Stella, Johnnie’s wife, lay dead on the kitchen floor… right where she had fallen dead from the butcher knife wound in her heart – the night the storm had started.

'Sure, Johnnie had screwed the neighbor broad right through. Stella had been so right about that. But he couldn’t figure why she came charging at him with that foot-long butcher knife. She had flown across the kitchen floor at him screaming her bloody head off… screaming like a wounded eagle. She was screaming as if all the devils of hell, the creatures from the grave, had entered her very being. It was not even her own voice. She had screamed at him before… many times before… but there was never the sound of panic, despair, horror in those tones… if the sounds could even be called tones.

'All he remembered about that moment, except the terrifying utterances that gaping mouth made, was that gleaming butcher knife, raised so high above her head and it was coming in his direction… the high-pitched scream… the gaping mouth… the saliva-dripping tongue and lips… the red… bloodshot red eyes which suddenly seemed to have no eyelids… simply blood-red eyes in dark sockets… never blinking…and that black negligee trailing out behind her like sheer bat wings on a heavy breeze.'

Recreations

There's an ebook publisher called Prologue Books, who do sterling work in resurrecting infamous and sometimes even very good pulp novels from (mainly), the 1940s to 1970s. Often their covers are the standard modern version of pulp covers--moody photos of men with guns, women reclining on beds, and shiny spaceships--but sometimes they've taken the slightly disconcerting step of recreating the original pulp cover images with modern technology. Somehow, mid-20th-Century sexploitation and sleaze looks wrong when rendered in clean digital photography and with sleek Photoshop filters. Here are some examples...

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The painted cover is a hell of a lot sexier (that naked back) and sinister than its photo(shopped) equivalent: the painted man above looks like a dangerous intruder, the photographed man below looks as though he's going out to buy milk after experiencing erectile dysfunction.

 

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Vin Packer was really Marijane Meaker, who was for a while the lover of Patricia Highsmith, and author of a disappointing memoir about their relationship.

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This fantastic cover by Robert Maguire just doesn't have the same kick redone photographically.

 

Zolarama Addendum

I don't remember this title in Émile Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle. Something lost--or added--in translation, perhaps?

See here for much more Zola pulp sauce madness.

Steinbeck Unfortunates

As much as I have enjoyed most of John Steinbeck's work, I have to say that his To a God Unknown was not much good. It seemed to be Steinbeck channeling D. H. Lawrence, combining the worst aspects of both writers. However, I did enjoy this cover, which was recently included in an ABE mailout.

Lust for land?

Even better is this Corgi cover, which appears to show a young lady experimenting with urinating while standing up.

Here are a few more pulpy Steinbeck covers.

Drinking From a Skull Like a Coconut

A few months ago we looked at the first Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction (here and here). And now they're abouit to release volume two. The cover promises more delirious and endearingingly demented shenanigans.

Click for a big version in all its mad glory.

Baen (spelled with a double-D)

I've been trying to track down some obscure but supposedly excellent mid-century science-fiction short stories, and I find that some of them are available in new paperback collections published by Baen. That ought to be a good thing, but it isn't entirely--Baen books are almost universally hideous. Typography, colour choices and art combine to make for some of the most embarassing books you could be seen buying or reading in public.

They also tend to make use of one (or rather two) specific selling points in their art.

Those bosoms stay oddly pert for women who don't wear bras (or, indeed, clothes).

Random Things

A few random things. First of all, a brief Flaubertian follow-up to Zolarama, in which the alleged sexual license of French literature is abused for all it's worth by mid-century paperback publishers.

 

Secondly, a new (Vintage US) addition the the collection of On the Beach covers: simple, yet surprisingly effective.

Last of all, for some reason, the German-ness makes this all the more amusing.

Erotic, Valorous, Furious, Terror-Stricken, pathetic, Comic, Disgusting, Marvelous, Peaceful

One of the most striking covers I've ever seen:

It's The 9 Emotions of Indian Cinema Hoardings, another strange and wonderful book of Indian pop culture, published by Tamil Nadu-based Tara Books. I learned of this publisher, and their special handmade books scheme, through the excellent BibliOdyssey. Here's the back, with more information (click for bigger, readable version):

And here are a couple of interior spreads, to give you a taste (again, click for bigger versions):

 

Tamil Pulp

At the end of last year I briefly mentioned a book I suddenly and desperately wanted, The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction. Well, I now have it, and though I've only read a couple of the stories (one great, one awful, both daft as a brush), I have marvelled at the gallery of Subcontinental pulp covers it features. Here are some of them.