Pre-order a copy of SARJ’s horror/action novella, “Hotel Erebus”. It’s now available on Kickstarter and ships in early February. The Kickstarter project ends on Friday, January 9th.
“Hotel Erebus” on Kickstarter - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stratum/hotel-erebus-an-elijah-crowe-thrill-ride-pulp-novella
PULP FICTION
The American pulp fiction hero was born out of the ever-changing culture of a growing superpower. Cities were expanding and factions were consolidating where big business and crime intermixed into a vile stew. The first organized crime groups rose up in the late 19th century and spread into the early 20th. Corruption in the big American cities was rampant and while the cops and robbers were gunning it out in the streets, the poor working Americans were caught in the crossfire. In times of helplessness, people tend to express their fears, desires and angst through art and culture, and this was best seen in the invention of the pulp hero.
The new media was subversive in its own way by promoting vigilantism; even violent bank robbers like Bonnie and Clyde were molded into folk heroes by the working poor who saw robbing of banks as a way that ‘the little guy’ shook his fist at the establishment. New fiction also romanticized dangerous women who were deceptively competent and who had aims and designs of their own. This was a time of tumultuous evolution in regards to men’s and women’s roles in society where boundaries were pushed. The roaring 20s were just that, and they ended on a great economic crash. In this stew of cultural change, economic collapse and an epidemic of organized crime, the response would form the foundation of men’s fiction. If the outlaws wore suits and fedoras, then the pulp heroes tasked with fighting them would do the same. But in addition to these accouterments, the heroes would either wear masks to conceal their true identities, or they’d assume secret identities through means of magic and/or subterfuge.
Pulp heroes were battle-hardened street toughs that rarely had what the “superhero” would have in coming decades; no, these were normal human men filled with grit and gusto, ready to take the fight to the rum-runners, the traffickers and the ones who greased the hands of corrupt politicians. Even in pulp stories involving the supernatural, the male protagonists were the kind of men who worked down at the docks or had come home from the war; they were relatable toughs who were both aspirational and recognizable as the guy sitting next to you, sipping his drink at the local watering hole.
It took courage to live in dark and dreary days and the exploits of the pulp hero provided some hopeful escapism. Trigger-happy gangsters got their due; foreign agents coming into America to stir up trouble were given their just desserts. It was vigilante justice served to a public that was sick and tired of the lawlessness. So in the pulp novels, when the law failed the heroes, they merely took the law into their own hands, and the public ate it up.
Among the legions of two-fisted terrors were Doc Savage and Zorro whose inspiration would create the blueprint for heroes of a future era in Superman and Batman.
As time went on and WW2 changed everything, the pulp hero would slide into his place within the hallowed halls of history, revered but not forgotten. Other characters that were imbued with his same values as the champions of pulp: courage, justice, fairness, stoicism, controlled violence and a penchant for finding trouble, would all be rediscovered in the American superhero, and then in heroes from other genres like Japanese Manga. Heroism changes forms but it always stays the same.
By the way, if you’re interested in pulp novels, I recently wrote one called Hotel Erebus. It’s a two-fisted thrill ride about a man trapped in a haunted hotel with nothing but two guns and a desire to get the hell out.
Pre-order a copy of SARJ’s horror/action novella, “Hotel Erebus”. It’s now available on Kickstarter and ships in early February. The Kickstarter project ends on Friday, January 9th.
“Hotel Erebus” on Kickstarter - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stratum/hotel-erebus-an-elijah-crowe-thrill-ride-pulp-novella
SARJ OUT
