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Post by dem bones on Aug 17, 2016 14:29:10 GMT
Anyone know where I can pick up vols 1 & 2? Hi Lincoln. These are usually sold out on publication, after which it's quite hard to find them at reasonable prices. I've got the same problem with Paperback Fanatic - I subscribed from issue #8 and don't have the earlier issues. By the way, can someone tell me if there is PF #1 to #7, or did Pulp Mania become PF at some point? The first issue was Pulpmania, and the second was Paperback Dungeon. Justin settled on Paperback Fanatic for the third issue, a Sphere books special. It all got a bit confusing for a while! For example, our thread for Paperback Fanatic 3 relates to the third issue under that title, though on the cover it is marked "issue 5." It's easier to scan the covers than it is to explain. Bear with me a while. 1. Pulpmania (aka, Paperback Fanatic #1) 2. Paperback Dungeon (aka, Paperback Fanatic #2) 3. Paperback Fanatic #3 4. Paperback Fanatic #4 5. Paperback Fanatic #5 6. Paperback Fanatic #6 7. Paperback Fanatic #7
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Post by jamesdoig on Aug 18, 2016 9:35:37 GMT
Thanks Dem - very nice!
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Post by dem bones on Aug 18, 2016 19:03:14 GMT
Where were we? Oh yeah. Before we move on to Pulp Horror #4 (told you this would be a marathon post), Justin's pieces on the novels of John Blackburn and Basil Copper's The Great White Space. I'm glad it's not just me who thinks the latter "takes an age to get going." I'm a big fan of Basil's short horror fiction - even something as ludicrous as Dr. Porthos is fantastically bad vampire fiction - but almost invariably struggle to finish the novels, Necropolis being another case in point. The Curse Of The Fleers is a tidy Gothic yarn, but even that treads water for a couple of chapters. No such difficulty with John Blackburn. His highly convoluted plots move at pace and I've yet to read anything by him, be it a novel or one of his too few shorts, I didn't get along with, the ever so slightly insane Devil Daddy being a particular favourite. As with Charles Birkin, it is great to be able to read about these phenomenal talents in a contemporary publication.
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Post by andydecker on Aug 19, 2016 9:14:03 GMT
Where were we? Oh yeah. Before we move on to Pulp Horror #4 (told you this would be a marathon post), Justin's pieces on the novels of John Blackburn and Basil Copper's The Great White Space. I'm glad it's not just me who thinks the latter "takes an age to get going." I'm a big fan of Basil's short horror fiction - even something as ludicrous as Dr. Porthos is fantastically bad vampire fiction - but almost invariably struggle to finish the novels, Necropolis being another case in point. The Curse Of The Fleers is a tidy Gothic yarn, but even that treads water for a couple of chapters. No such difficulty with John Blackburn. His highly convoluted plots move at pace and I've yet to read anything by him, be it a novel or one of his too few shorts, I didn't get along with, the ever so slightly insane Devil Daddy being a particular favourite. As with Charles Birkin, it is great to be able to read about these phenomenal talents in a contemporary publication. The same for me. I never could get into Necropolis. But I was an instant fan of Blackburn. Broken Boy is a wonderful novel. Since then I read a few others, to my surprise he was marketed as a crime writer in the early 70s in Germany and had a few translations.
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Post by dem bones on Aug 28, 2016 9:13:18 GMT
After the tentative dip in the acid bath of contemporary horror in #3, it is back to the Fanatic's traditional hunting ground in the companion issue, namely full-on old school speed-pulp weirdness. And where better to start than with a slab of 'seventies German Horror? The more I read about this stuff, the more I curse that DämonenKiller, Dr. Morton & Co. were not exported to Britain, or if they were, I sure never got to see copies. Blood Orgy Of The Corpses Pit, Shadow Of The Guillotine, The Woman From Plot 13, The Mummy's Secret, Wax Museum, The Hour Of The Ants ... you only have to read the titles to know that these 65 page weekly novels are going to be terrific. Here Andreas Decker gives us the history of misanthropic Dorian Hunter, the Dämonen Killer, and his glamorous sidekick Coco, stars of one of only two horror titles to be driven out of business by the authorities on the grounds that they were harmful to minors. Andreas is at pains to remind us that these digests (?) are not really as extreme as their lurid cover art would suggest, but we are all used to that by now, thanks to the Shudder Pulps and the less exuberant of the Hamlyn 'nasties' and I am sure they would have had a thriving market over here. If James Moffat could sell millions of paperbacks .... Hugh B. Caves Murgunstrumm & Others is a ridiculous huge selection of often samey stories featuring all the usual hackneyed MAD SCIENTISTS, Black sorcerers, bloody rotten vampires, creeping hands, deranged artists and honeymoon brides in peril. It is, of course, unspeakably brilliant but not a book you should attempt to crash through (see also any Seabury Quinn Jules de Grandin selection). Lee Brown Coye's specially commissioned artwork for this volume is justly revered, but,ungrateful bastard that I am, I'd have preferred editor KEW to have stuck with the original, sometimes not especially accomplished illustrations that accompanied these stories on their original magazine appearances. The title novella and, especially, Stragella are the pair often damned with "classic" status, but, while there might be some truth to this, I incline toward inspired lunacy of The Strange Death Of Ivan Gromleigh, The Whisperers, The Watcher In The Green Room and Cult Of The White Ape.
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Post by dem bones on Aug 30, 2016 11:51:44 GMT
Women in peril Ed Valigursky style. But don't worry ... Fantastic is among the few old school supernatural-horror-SF interest pulps yet to receive a designated thread on Vault, something we shall have to put right because, as James Doig so ably demonstrates, there was far more to the magazine than magnificent cover artwork courtesy of Richard Power, Edward Valigursky, Grey Morrow, Barye Phillips, W.T. Mars et al. As the title suggests, this is ostensibly another Pulp Horror gallery, but I prefer them when they are like this, a judicious selection of covers and instructive commentary. The pre-sixties issues have proved a treasure trove for horror anthologists thanks to macabre stories by latter-day Weird Tales contributors - Fritz Leiber, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch (with or without Edgar Allen Poe, sometimes as 'Winston Kane'), Ray Bradbury (his enduring carney murder mystery, The Dwarf is an early highlight) - plus the dark creations of emerging talents and established greats including John Wyndham ( Close Behind Him), Truman Capote with his creepy child ghost, Miriam, and Robert Sheckley's black sorcery offering, The Altar. Perhaps another avenue for Pulp Horror to explore would be interior artwork, because some of Fantastic's is indeed just that. .... they usually got their own back.
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