When’s the last time reading material kicked you in the balls and laughed as it left you vomiting on the sidewalk? I’m guessing it was the issue just prior to the just-released OUT OF THE GUTTER #4. Yes, the indie “modern journal of pulp fiction and degenerate literature” is back with another 200 pages of stories and article so rough-and-tumble dirty, you’ll need a shower afterward … during which it will come back and rape you.

This is all a good thing, of course, being made a book’s bitch. Editor Matt Louis has deemed this “The Hard Times Issue” – timely that – and the contributors run with the loose theme. As always, the mag begins with a flash fiction section, where Robert T. Lord offers “For I Have Sinned,” in which a mother’s confession to a priest who apparently has ignored his own advice of “Do unto to others …”

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The high-gloss City Slab is one of those magazines that, as a self-publisher myself, tends to infuriate me. They obviously have the resources and staff to fill up a magazine – a full-size glossy, no less; this ain’t no little dime zine – but is so ugly to look at that it actually detracts from the whole experience.

The writing is great, fanboy stuff – not perfection, but entertaining – with features on Sheri Moon Zombie and the film VACANCY. The fiction is silly and breezy, while two in-depth pieces that really caught my eye – one on Marilyn Manson’s new album as well as the history of the proto-industrial outfit Coil – are actually cool, yet scholarly enough to appear in a general music magazine (possibly Blender if it weren’t so focused on getting singers in their panties on the cover). Too bad that everything surrounding it is an utter eyesore.

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In case you haven’t noticed, war is hell. Or – as Gen. Sherman famously said after the Civil War – “war is all hell.” That theme informs, permeates and downright douses OUT OF THE GUTTER #3, another hardcore dose of “pulp fiction and degenerate literature” that once more earns its stripes as such.

The indie mag begins with a section of “flash” fiction – two- to three-page short stories all dealing with war, particularly right in the thick of it, about to be decapitated, shot, gutted or otherwise harmed with extreme prejudice. Slightly longer stories include Sandra Seaman’s sniper-narrated “In the Shadow of Murder” and OOTG editor Matt Louis’ “Gems from a Centenarian,” in which a reporter attempts – laughably – to interview a 100-year-old crusty war veteran at a nursing home.

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Quick takes and capsule reviews from the dark suspense master himself, Ed Gorman!

The other night, a blogful of people talked about how it’s cool to read something purely entertaining sometimes. One of my favorites in this category is Loren D. Estleman’s 1989 novel PEEPER, about a sink-hole dirtbag Detroit private eye named Ralph Poteet.

Even after three readings over the years, PEEPER keeps me laughing – many times out loud – all the way through. This isn’t cheap parody. It’s a witty take on many private-eye clichés filled with people you wouldn’t want to meet without wearing a biohazard suit, including a monsignor who dies in a whorehouse.

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Much like the station it comes from, THE BEST OF LCD: THE ART AND WRITING OF WFMU is hard to categorize. For those unfamiliar with WFMU, it’s the only freeform radio station of the nation, completely listener-supported. Edited by Dave the Spazz, this is a collection of the cream of the crop from its former on-air schedule/zine LCD, which stood for “Lowest Common Denominator.”

To say this book is cover-to-cover packed is an understatement, starting with the foreword by director Jim Jarmusch, who claims to leave the station on even when not at home. There are a plethora of comic strips that were exclusive to the zine, be it a jab at folkie Phil Ochs, or the aptly tilted “Hanging with the Low Life Scum,” which pokes fun at some of the people you would find at a record fair.

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The debut issue of the digest-sized Bachelor Pad Magazine promises three things: booze, babes and burly-q. It fulfills all those promises real quick.

Picking up from what was started in the sadly defunct Kutie magazine, this is a throwback to the men’s periodicals of yore – the type that are now sold for ridiculous prices, offering nothing but promises and very little follow-through. But Bachelor Pad knows who its audience is right away: guys who wish that Vegas were still Vegas from the good ol’ days of the Rat Pack.

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America’s favorite humor-laden, rotten-to-the-bone, maggot-infested spank mag is back, bigger and better than ever. That’s right: it’s Girls and Corpses #2. What does it say about me that I can’t get enough of this publication?

Issue two is an even more polished affair, with current HALLOWEEN hottie Danielle Harris on the cover, in a 1940s pulp pose, next to a realistically freaky corpse. She’s interviewed inside as well. Other pieces include an article on funeral etiquette (“Don’t order pizza”), interviews with HOSTEL II writer/director Eli Roth and B-movie actress Sybil Danning, and a how-to on dating a corpse.

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At first glance, the debut issue of Windy Corner Magazine may look like something your kid made one afternoon in art class. And that’s okay, because subverting your expectations only will open your mind to be accepting of all of this indie effort’s innumerable charms.

The brainchild of editor Austin English, Windy Corner is anchored by much of his Crayola-penned comics — slice-of-life pieces about a girl named Francis, dealing with a shaky home life because of lean times and the discovery of her father’s adultery.

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Just as the cover images warns, OUT OF THE GUTTER #2 will beat you senseless with 200 pages of tough-as-nails fiction that punches straight for the gut. It’s even an improvement over the near-perfect first issue. Plus, as editor Matthew Louis’ introductory letter tantalizes, “We’ve got whores.”

Changes are slight, mainly being the upfront inclusion of a “flash fiction” section consisting of eight super-short stories. If you don’t like any of them, you’ve only invested no more than a page or two. But if you don’t like any of them, you’re reading the wrong magazine, because they’re all dive-right-in terrific, starting with the opening line of John McFetridge’s drug-smugglin’ “Plugged”: “Summer had seen bigger dildos.”

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Spicy Mystery Stories was one of the Culture Publications pulps, and you just can’t get more ironic than that. They sold for a quarter and in most cities resided under the counter. Take a look at that cover art and it won’t be hard to guess why. Sex, violence and death all in one nifty, semi-surrealist H.J. Ward painting. Dali should have been working for the pulps.

This May 1936 issue, reprinted by Adventure House, provides a terrific introduction to the world of weird-menace storytelling: a particular subgenre of the horror story in which a Gothic atmosphere is established, usually in a paragraph or two, and some sort of incredible danger is introduced. This danger more than likely will come in the form of a human monster, a zombie, a ghost, a being returned from the past or just an all-around, slavering, lecherous, humanoid.

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“Hey, you got your corpses on my girls!”

“Well, you got your girls on my corpses!”

And that was the conversation that I imagined had to be the impetus behind the sickly comical new mag Girls and Corpses, which, in case you couldn’t figure it out for yourself, is all about hot girls cavorting with musty ol’ dead bodies. It actually would be necro-whacking material if it weren’t so damn funny. (Granted, I’m sure there are a few necros who do spank to it.)

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Many people who wouldn’t be caught dead with a pulp magazine still insist that they know what the quality of pulp fiction was, and it wasn’t high. The fact is that the vast majority of pulp fiction was like the majority of any kind of fiction: mediocre.

But much of that was more mediocre than usual, and Saucy Movie Tales – nestled comfortably under the counter between the hardcore girlie mags and mostly innocuous junk like Breezy Stories – was saved from the scrapheap of faded nostalgia by its cover art, much of which was supplied by the great Norman Saunders. The cover of its Sept. 1936 reprint is pretty extreme; the emphasis in the art was on the same thing it was in the text: breasts.

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Pulp magazines now are enjoying their greatest flood of popularity since the rediscovery of Edgar Rice Burroughs kick-started the pulp boom of the 1960s. Falling between the pricey original magazines still in existence and the acceptably priced reprint editions are the exact replicas. These match the original mag’s dimensions and page count, and include everything that the first purchaser bought 55-85 years ago: all the ads, the letters to the editor, the not-so-inspiring interior art and the hyperbole.

One of the leading producers of pulp replicas is Girasol Collectables, which puts out three replicas every month at a $25 or $35 per. Honestly, that’s a little steep for me, especially since other folks are doing it cheaper. Whining aside, I just finished reading Girasol’s replica of Amazon/hitchmagazine-20″ target=”new”>Feb. 1936 issue of Spicy Mystery. Look at that H.J. Ward painting and tell me that you don’t want to read the stories that lurk behind that cover. Go on – I dare you.

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Quick takes and capsule reviews from the dark suspense master himself, Ed Gorman!

The only series I read regularly are those that offer worlds I want to visit. This may be because before I began reading mysteries regularly, I read science fiction. World-building is critical in sci-fi and fantasy.

And it is in mystery fiction, too. Sherlock Holmes. Agatha Christie. John Dickson Carr. Indelible worlds. Or Mr. and Mrs. North. Craig Rice’s various detectives working out of Chicago. Hammett, Chandler, Chester Himes’ Harlem novels.

And Bill Crider’s small-town Texas series, the latest of which is MURDER AMONG THE OWLS. This time, Sheriff Dan Rhodes has to decide whether Helen Harris’ death was accidental or criminal. At certain points in his investigation, his deputies are his biggest hindrance to solving what is now clearly a crime. Wizards they’re not.

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Good fiction magazines aren’t easy to find – heck, even bad ones are off the radar – but look to the small press and you’re more apt to discover one. DARK WISDOM is one of them.

Published quarterly by Elder Signs Press, DARK WISDOM calls itself “the magazine of dark fiction.” Its 10th issue – the first I’ve seen –  certainly fits that bill, opening with William C. Dietz’s “Dead Men Talk a Lot,” imagining a time when we can communicate with the recently deceased via telephone.

Other stories are equally dispiriting in mood, but pretty decent in execution, like E. Sedia’s “Yakov and the Crows,” a three-page marvel about, yep, a Russian, some birds and a pitch-black ending. Similar in style is “The Generosity of Strangers,” in which Michael McBride’s thesis-writing grad student tries to save the life of a suicidal stranger over the phone.

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Pulp fiction makes a dirty, dirty comeback in the premiere issue of OUT OF THE GUTTER, a new, “completely independent” magazine that promises dangerous “degenerate literature” and “hardboiled fiction,” and then spends 200 pages delivering just that.

I’m not sure why they’re calling it a magazine, since it’s a perfect-bound trade paperback on high-quality paper, but they can call it whatever they want. I don’t wish to have my ass kicked.

The layout leaves more than a bit to be desired, having an amateurish, almost sloppy quality, but any reservations are quickly dashed aside once you start reading the lead story, Victor Gischler’s “Final Tally,” which is kind of a one-man DEATH RACE 2000. J.A. Konrath’s “Punishment” also recalls a blood-drenched cult classic –  HOSTEL – but with a politically incorrect twist ending.

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There’s one in every office: that “wacky” guy where everything he does or says is some sort of forced craziness. Whether it be recounting a Dane Cook routine, putting up “ironic” posters of monkeys or getting a well-deserved smack to the breadbasket for taking “Talk Like a Pirate Day” way too far, you know who I’m talking about. It’s a facade – an attempt to carve a persona, a personality, where there is none.

And now, they have a new magazine to read. It’s called Geek Monthly. Because it’s for geeks – get it? Not for real, over- or underweight, socially awkward, D&D-playing nerds who wait until 2 a.m. for the latest copy of Windows Vista geeks, but those cool, fashionable ones who wear tight lime-green sweaters, have $500 faux-thick glasses and masturbate to photos of Weezer in between shopping sprees at Hot Topic, whereupon they buy a shirt of Chuck Norris playing an old-school Atari.

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Spy magazine’s influence on my writing, my sense of humor, my career, my life cannot be understated. From that fated day I stumbled upon a 1988 issue in a Buy for Less grocery store in Oklahoma City of all places, I was hooked. Never before had a magazine been created seemingly just for me. Never mind I had spent a grand total of 10 days in New York, which served not only as the magazine’s home but the recipient of most of its well-aimed arrows – its unique mix of satire, investigative reporting and design went straight to my heart.

So why, then, did I hesitate to read SPY: THE FUNNY YEARS, a warts-and-all account of its dozen years of existence? Because the chintzy powers that be at Miramax Books ignored my two requests for a review copy? Perhaps.

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If the hair on the nape of your neck doesn’t rise when you see story titles like “Mistress of Snarling Death,” “Blood Bait for Hungry Mermaids” or, best of all, “The Mole-Men Want Your Eyes,” you should probably just scroll along. Ignore me, for I am about to take a detour off the main course of American letters and wander the meandering, weedy path of pulp fiction.

Or better yet, stroll along with me.

Now, when I talk about “pulp fiction,” I’m referring to the real thing: genre stories from the mountains of ephemeral popular literature of the early 20th century. You’re a working stiff in 1934 with an extra dime or 15 cents in your pocket. You pass a newsstand or drug store on your way home and see row after row of fiction magazines with gaudy, thrilling, enticing covers. The magazines’ titles promise a cornucopia of delights, with something for every taste.

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Quick takes and capsule reviews from the dark suspense master himself, Ed Gorman!

Few of my prophecies work out. I am, after all, the guy who predicted that TERMINATOR 2 would flop at the box office.

To my credit, though, I’m also the guy who crystal-balled the idea that FALLING ANGEL by William Hjortsberg would become a classic. At the time –  1978 – not everybody agreed with me. Hard-boiled purists claimed that mixing the supernatural with the private-eye genre was a defilement of both forms.

But how can you dismiss a novel that’s as well written as anything Raymond Chandler ever penned, as spooky as the best of Stephen King, and as historically fascinating (New York City in the ’50s) as Caleb Carr’s THE ALIENIST?

Millipede Press, one of the smartest of small publishing houses, has brought out a new trade paperback edition introduced by noir master James Crumley (my favorite novel of his being THE WRONG CASE, a book, as I recall, not even Crumley thinks much of; and speaking of predictions, everybody I arm-twisted into buying it went “nyet”).

I don’t have to do much selling here, do I? If you have even the barest crime fiction collection, this belongs on the classics shelf, a bloody stew of voodoo and gumshoe.

• • •

Over the past 20 years, Christopher Fahy has written a number of novels that put him at the top of the suspense-horror genres. It’s not just his polish and wit that makes his books so special; it’s also his somber, serious take on our society that makes his book linger in memory.

Examples of all his literary virtues are easy to find in his new collection MATINEE AT THE FLAME, from Overlook Connection Press. The stories have enough supernatural razzle-dazzle to thrill the horror fan, but also enough realistic grit to please the more mainstream reader.

The best story for me is the title story. If you’re old enough to remember playwright John Osborne’s “The Entertainer,” you’ll recall that Osborne was dealing with the artist’s inability to separate the stage him from the “real” him. Fahy goes him one better. Here, the artist is an ordinary man who is thrust on the stage of a deserted (or so he thought) movie theater where he shares with a cynical audience all the ways he has failed in his life. A moving, memorable tale – a trip down the biploar vortex, for sure.

“Transformations,” “It’s in the Cards” and “Convention” (a funny take on fan gatherings) are among the other winners in a book without any clinkers. Good to see Chris Fahy back again.

• • •

I’m pretty sure I first read GRAVE DESCEND in a men’s magazine of the late ’60s – REAL BALLS ADVENTURE or one of those. I’m also pretty sure it was published there under the John Lange pen name, as was its initial appearance in paperback. Now, Hard Case Crime has brought it back with a sexy cover painting reminiscent of the ’50s and ’60s.

This is fine basic pulp written by one of the great pulp writers of our time, Michael Crichton, masquerading as Lange. You don’t read Crichton for style or character especially (though he’s much better at both than he’s usually given credit for); you read him for story and, man, can he tell a story, as here where a wrecked yacht creates a mystery that attracts (thank God) all the wrong kinds of people, including our protagonist. If you want to study plotting 101, this is a book you should analyze for setting up a mystery that grows richer with each chapter.

Not too long after this book’s first appearance, Crichton published THE ANDROMEDA STRAIN and quickly became rich and famous.

If you like to relax with the kind of slicked-up adventure paperback original that came into vogue in the 1970s, you’ll want to pick this one up. The back jacket copy also lists several other “John Lange” novels, each of them as good as this one. They deserve to be in print again and hopefully Hard Case will do them.

• • •

Among the many fine things Gauntlet Press has done over its history is to bring us Richard Matheson material that we probably wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

That tradition certainly continues with BLOODLINES, edited by Mark Dawidziak: Matheson’s DRACULA (his screenplay), the full-length novel I AM LEGEND, several Matheson classic short stories doing riffs on the vampire legend and tributes from various Hollywood people.

For all that’s he accomplished, I still don’t think Matheson has ever gotten his due for how much he changed popular fiction in horror, mystery, Western and mainstream fiction. The tributes here pretty much say the same thing: how powerful an influence he’s been on at least three generations of writers and yet he’s still not a household name.

This is a splendid book in every respect and many thanks to publisher BarryHoffman, editor Dawidziak and, of course, Matheson himself.

• • •

Back in the ’50s, it was the most devout of dreams of science-fiction fans to see a slick magazine devoted to nothing but SF stories The reasoning was that the slick format – shiny paper, color throughout – would convince skeptics that SF was a legitimate form of popular fiction. Thus did Hugo Gernsback create the publication called SF+. The problem being, as I recall, that for all its good looks, the fiction was almost ridiculously old-fashioned, the sort that Gernsback himself had published when launched AMAZING STORIES back in the ’30s.

Then in the Seventies came VERTEX, a handsome magazine with some extremely good stories. But it just didn’t find the audience required to support ambitions.

Less dramatic attempts were tried with mystery magazines. Most notably, MANHUNT and HITCHCOCK notably turned their digest-size formats into the size of the recently refigured TV GUIDE: much bigger, splashier. But the format change ddn’t work out and the magazines reverted to digest-size.

Finally, there’s a genre magazine that has not only survived but prospered as a large-size, slick, full-color and advertising-packed succes.

I’m taking about, of course, THE STRAND MAGAZINE, which slants its contents toward the Golden Age of detective fiction (the original STRAND being the UK magazine that dominated crime fiction at the turn of the last century), but complements this with articles and interviews with Colin Dexter, Carolyn Hart, Max Allan Collins and Martin Edwards). This is really an imposing, impressive magazine that certainly demonstrates that mystery fiction can hold its own with all other newstand magazines. This is one you need to check out right away: www.strandmag.com

• • •

Donald Westlake once remarked something to the effect that a cult writer is someone who’s three readers short of making a living. John Shirley always has had plenty of work, yet he still seems to be a working definition of cult writer. His loyal followers are fanatical about his work and though he can turn out for-hire books quickly (based on a piece he wrote in THE ALIEN CRITIC years ago), he seems willing to defy all trends and publishing wisdom when it comes to doing his serious work. He does what he wants, the way he wants.

Infrapress’ IN DARKNESS WAITING is a good example. While an outline of the novel seems familiar enough – a large cast of characters in a small desert town come to realize that they are under siege by creatures that come to be called Gray Pilots – Shirley is really using the metaphoric invasion (ancient creatures that have long fostered the worst in humanity) to address, as he often does, the rather sorry moral state of our species.

None of this is done pretentiously. Shirley is an exciting writer whether he’s doing a fight scene, a love scene or handling backstory. He’s got plenty of pulp in him and that makes for great reading, at least when handled with his particular brand of skill and ferocity. He’s also got something few writers have – let alone sustain over a long career: true, raging passion for his people and his beliefs. That keeps his work fresh and urgent.

It’s a great read, one way too long-out-of-print. Also look for Shirley’s CELLARS, also published by Infrapress, with an excellent introduction by Edward Lee. It’s as good as IN DARKNESS WAITING, and every bit as brutal, nasty and somber in its look at our nature. –Ed Gorman

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OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THESE AUTHORS:
• GRAVE DESCEND by John Lange
• STATE OF FEAR by Michael Crichton
• WOMAN by Richard Matheson