Cult Pulp

Sabotage Times separates the wheat from the chaff in regards to pulp fiction.

From the piece...

In the late 1970s, New English Library specialised in trash fiction such as the Skinhead and Suedehead novels written under various pen names by James Moffat (who influenced Stewart Home, author of the 1999 novel Cunt –now there’s a cult title if ever I heard one). NEL also produced a neat line in trash horror with books such as James Herbert’s The Rats and Guy N. Smith’s Night of the Crabs. Smith has penned well over a hundred works, mostly horror but also much else, from soft porn to Walt Disney novelizations. But even his prolific output is dwarfed by that of Walter B. Gibson, who, as Maxwell Grant, wrote 282 novel-length stories, from the 1930s to the 1950s, about US comic-book hero The Shadow. These were my favourites on NEL’s ’70s list, and I still regard it as a pity that they only reprinted the first four or five in the series.

Like Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s most famous creation, The Shadow, may live on through films and television – the 1994 movie with Alec Baldwin frequently crops up in the schedules – but when did anyone last read one of the books, and where are they now? I can’t walk past the second-hand book market beneath London’s Waterloo Bridge without devoting another half-hour of my life to the search, so far in vain. A couple of recent finds raised some excitement, however. One was the ’60s cold war/sci-fi thriller Hauser’s Memory by Curt Siodmak, an overlooked sequel to his earlier book Donovan’s Brain, which, in addition to two movie adaptations, spawned Steve Martin’s spoof, The Man with Two Brains, and a Star Trek episode called ‘Spock’s Brain’. The other find was a sci-fi tale called The Last Continent by forgotten ’70s author Edmund Cooper; his novel The Overman Culture still haunts me, from when I first read it thirty-odd years ago, as a far-sighted forerunner to the fictional worlds of The Matrix, A.I. and Blade Runner – though, of course, when it comes to cult sci-fi gods, no one beats Philip K. Dick.