This week’s column goes back to the bread and butter of my reading pile: mindless paperbacks that were once commonplace in racks at truck stops. These are books with covers that promise the world, but can they deliver? Let’s find out …
C.A.T. #3: CULT OF THE DAMNED by Spike Andrews — Sometimes, there’s a cover you stare in amazement. This 1983 work is one of those: a guy fighting what looks like giant rats, a girl getting naked, a sniper, trains exploding, and one pissed-off dude. Well, 90 percent of that makes it into the story, which is also the problem: You have three storylines to follow, and they combine at the end in a rather forced manner.
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Because we are both fortunate and unfortunate enough not to have been born in the previous turn of the century, reprints help fill the void of what we missed (past lives excepted, if you believe in reincarnation). At BOOKGASM, that often means the pulps, and today, the ADVENTURE pulp in particular.
Has any fiction magazine been so simply and appropriately named? You now can given an educated answer, thanks to editor Doug Ellis compiling THE BEST OF ADVENTURE: VOLUME 1, 1910-1912. Through Black Dog Books, he’s rounded up the 24 best stories from its first 26 of 753 issues.
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Do you miss the nautical novels of Patrick O’Brian, adventurous tales of the sea, and doughty warriors involved in daring escapades?
Can you handle a shift in ancestry and time from Englishmen fighting during the Napoleonic Wars to Spaniards wreaking havoc in the 17th century?
If so, then you should be reading Arturo Pérez-Reverte and his series of books featuring Captain Alatriste, the latest of which is PIRATES OF THE LEVANT, translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa and new to paperback.
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Just because the Cold War has been relegated to a topic of contemporary world history doesn’t mean the super-power nations trust each other. No author understands this better than John le Carré. OUR KIND OF TRAITOR, now out in paperback, returns his focus to the now fragmented but no less threatening clandestine activities of the former Soviet Union.
Perry Makepiece, a talented but disillusioned tutor of English literature at Oxford University, travels to the island of Antigua in the Caribbean with his girlfriend, Gail, a successful lawyer, to contemplate his future. At the resort, Perry meets a wealthy Russian businessman who calls himself Dima and challenges him to a game of tennis. Perry wins the match, but Dima is impressed with the Englishman and his beautiful lady, and immediately becomes the couple’s new best friend.
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Just in time for the start of summer arrives editor Otto Penzler’s latest big-as-a-brick anthology, THE BIG BOOK OF ADVENTURE STORIES. If you buy only one piece of fiction for the season, make it this one. It’s full of awesomeness, and at 900 pages, it’s going to take you a lot of laying out by the pool or on the beach.
The press materials peg as “destined to be the greatest collection of adventure stories ever compiled,” and I would not disagree. Penzler has assembled some of the genre’s greatest authors, greatest characters and greatest —yes — adventures for an overview that stands essential, whether you grew up on this stuff or are just getting ready to.
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