Published in the February 1931 issue of Astounding Stories, "Werewolves Of War" by D.W. Hall takes place seven years in the future, after the Slavs have overrun Europe and are now laying waste to the United States. The last scrappy defenders of America are just barely holding off the Slavs at California, and doing battle in the hazardous no-man's land of Nevada. D.W. Hall gives us the kind of writing you just don't see nowadays. Witness:

Trapped again!

But this time, Lance swore, they'd not get away without paying dearly for it!

Under the mesh of his gas-mask the lean lines of his jaw went taut. Tense, steely fingers flipped to the knobbed control instruments; the gleaming single-seater scout plane catapulted in a screaming somersault. Lance's ever-wary sixth sense told him the tongues of disintegrating flame had licked the plane's protected belly, and for the fact that it was protected he thanked again his stupendous luck. He pulled savagely at the squat control stick; the four Rahl-Diesels unleashed a torrent of power; and the slim scout rose like a comet, and hurtled, the altitude dial's nervous finger proclaimed, to ten thousand feet. Lance eased off the power, relaxed slightly, and glanced below.

So the Slavs have amazing super-weapon, the disintegrating flame, which takes out American airplanes by the dozen and whose secrets baffle America's scientists. Only the heroic squadron leader, Lance, is able to strike back at the Slavs using his acidic bullets, which give off "acrid white smoke" after they hit. This is a "scientific war," as Lance's commanding officer notes. But there's a traitor amongst Lance's unit, the Werewolves Of War, and nothing can stop the relentless encroachment of the villainous Slavs:

Werewolves of War, the batch of planes he belonged to had been christened, and it was a richly deserved title. In front of the front they fought, detailed to desperate, harrying missions, losing an average of ten men a day. The ordeal of gas and fire and acid bullets added five years to a man's brow overnight-if he served with the Werewolves of War.

Lance was only twenty-four, but his hair was splotched with dead gray strands; his eyes were hard and weary; his face lined with new wrinkles. Ah, well, it was war-and a losing war, he had to admit, that they fought. If a miracle didn't come, America would crumble even as old Europe had, before the overwhelming Slavish troops.

Even now, as Lance knew through various rumors, the Slavs were massed for a grand attack. And with what could America hold them back?

The unit also includes a comical Cockney mechanic, a refugee from a defeated England. My favorite part is when the story mentions that Lance "Immelmanned up." That's going to be my new catch phrase: "Immelman up, why don't you?" Lance suspects his fellow officer, Praed, is a coward and a spy — but he little realizes the shocking truth about Praed's identity, and how it relates to an amazing new secret super-weapon... the Flying Torpedo! But to win, they must destroy San Francisco utterly!

The whole story just went online recently, as part of Project Gutenberg — and in fact, that whole issue of Astounding Stories is on the site, for your astonishment and delight. Also included in the issue: "Tentacles From Below!" by Anthony Gilmore, "Phalanxes Of Atlans" by F.V.W. Mason, and "The Pirate Planet" (not to be confused with the Doctor Who story) by Charles W. Diffin. Enjoy! [Project Gutenberg via Free Speculative Fiction Online]

Way before the advent of comic books or paperback novels, our geeky forebears got their fill of escapist exploits from those descendants of the penny dreadful, the cheaply printed, but oh so delectable pulp magazines. Starting with Argosy in 1896 and peaking in the 20s and 30s, the pulps or dime novels were a fecund morass which nurtured the genres of Science Fiction, Westerns, Crime Drama, Historical Romance, Mystery, and Horror as well as the Science Heroes that developed into the Superheroes we see conquering the box-offices of today.

I was born at least a generation and a half too late too experience the pulps when they came out, but they do figure in my memories as a very young reader. Visiting my Great-Aunt Vicky and Great-Uncle Bob at their used bookstore in Maine I would beg to spend the night in the attic. With a flickering Coleman lantern I'd wile away the hours devouring Pogo comics, the Heinlein juveniles, and the adventures of none other than The Shadow. My favorite lullaby was a pair of pearl-handled .45s blazing into the night. Even now Lamont Cranston/Kent Allard's terrifying laughter echoes through my fondest memories. But I digress, constantly.

This anthology of all previously unpublished work tears out of the gate with Joe Lansdale's "The Crawling Sky" The Reverend Jebediah Mercer from the novel Dead in the West is once again Hell-bent for leather hunting down eldritch horror in the East Texas badlands. Here the Rev gives an accounting for himself:

I am on a mission from God. I do not like it, but it is my mission. I'm a hunter of the dark and a giver of the light. I'm the hammer and the anvil. The bone and the sinew. The sword and the gun. God's man who sets things right. Or at least as right as God sees them. Me and him, we do not always agree. And let me tell you, he is not the God of Jesus, he is the God of David, and the angry city killers and man killers and animal killers of the Old Testament. He constantly jealous and angry and if there is any plan to all this, I have yet to see it.
...It is my lot in life to destroy evil. There is more evil than there is me, I might add.

Oh. Yeah.
How's that for a cover letter? Try reciting that over a few belts of whiskey at your local watering hole in your best approximation of a Nacogdoches drawl. The results can be quite efficacious. I need more Rev. Mercer stories.

The Weird West feel is also strong in "Quiet Bullets" by Christopher Golden, but owing more to Rod Serling or Ray Bradbury than H.P. Lovecraft. Golden takes us back to those simple innocent times of being ten years old and all the fear and confusion that entails mixed with the cozy chills a really good ghost story can deliver. The creepiness continues as we discover something terribly wrong with William F. Nonaln's "Perfect Nanny" and pull back the lid of what we think we know in Cherie Priest's "Catastrophe Box". Ms. Priest was inspired by a case of real-life psychic researcher Harry Price (1881-1948) but her conclusion goes way past mere table-rapping at séances or wimpy cold spots.

The wild times to be found in the pulps didn't have to rely on fantastic elements. Plenty of gritty two-fisted tales were inspired the the greed and savagery to be found in the all too real mean streets. "A Gunfight" is David J. Schow's homage to Donald Westlake, a breathless blow by bloody blow report of a hardened criminal's desperate attempt to stay one step ahead of the Mob. FPS games are rarely this exciting. Tim Truman, the artist who collaborated with Lansdale on the infamous Jonah Hex comic books in the late 90s and did the cover illustration for Son of Retro Pulp Tales also has a story here. Turning away from the rotten core of the Big Apple, "Pretty Green Eyes" is a piece of hard-boiled nastiness of moonshiners and corrupt strike-breakers in the old West Virginia backwoods of Truman's own family history. Although this is his first published all-prose fiction, no one familiar with his work will be surprised to find he hits every crime pulp note square in the jaw. "Border Town" also draws from it's author's roots. James Grady presents a snowbound Montana train station in 1938 with a woman on the run and rat-bastard Nazi spies.

Speaking of fascist monsters, we veer back towards the bizarre for Matt Venne's "The Brown Bomber and the Nazi Werewolves of the S.S.". I'll just let the over-the-top title speak for itself adding only that the final paragraph was surprisingly stirring. Plunging even deeper into the lurid ridiculous potential of pulp are "The Forgotten Kingdom" "The Lizard Men of Blood River" by Mike Resnick and Stephen Mertz respectively. Both these adventures of Lost Cities and Nearly Nekkid Native Princesses have tongue thrust full through cheek. Resnick's hysterical pun-spewing rogue, the Right Reverend Lucifer Jones was probably the class clown at the same seminary Reverend Mercer went to. It seems in this day and age we can't take the Great White Hunters or Jungle Explorers seriously any more — somehow I feel Shia LaBeouf is all to blame. I wonder if a serious reinterpretation of Allan Quatermain or the like can still be done. Maybe he's as off-limits as another favorite of mine, the sinister Fu Manchu. It seems a shame really.

There's only one story here with Rocketships and Bug-Eyed Monsters and that's this one humble offering from Harlan Ellison. Yeah, you read that right, Harlan Muthafuckin' Ellison!. If his story intro is to be believed, "The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes" was originally penned in 1991 for a Bantam Books project that never saw the light of day. It's a wild take on the old fairy tale set in a seedy Mars colony with exploited native labor and an ancient artifact men and martians would kill for. A dark reflection of 1940s cosmic dreams that would not be out of place along side some of the "New" Space Opera of today. But what it really reminded me was the kick-ass thrills I got when I first read Deathbird Stories. This is pure balls out Ellison. I don't know if I'd want to be stuck in an elevator with him, but he writes a damn good story.

With four or five the stories being quite excellent and great fun to be had all the way through, Son of Retro Pulp Tales is way ahead of the curve and a mighty satisfying read. I wish Subterranean would come out with more affordable trade paperback editions, but that's just how they roll. In every one of these stories you sense the pure glee the writers had in shaping these cheap thrills from their own fond memories. This has the sense of wonder, adventure, and just plain fun that should never go out of style.

Son of Retro Pulp Tales will be available any day now directly from Subterranean Press,
or from the Usual Clowns.

Commenter Grey_Area is known to the agents of Shadowskeedeeboomboom as Chris Hsiang. He has the power to cloud his own mind and as yet lacks a boon companion. What a surprise.

The fan, Val Lindsay, explained all on the Whitechapel message board:

My dad sends me this ammo crate without telling me about it. In this crate are approximately 100+ sci fi pulps ranging from the 70s to the 30s... I think my immediate goal will be buy a good scanner and get the covers on a hard drive. As far as the books and contents, I'm not sure to the best course of action. They range from decent to falling-apart in shape.

It's not just the covers that Val is looking to save, either:

I've been thinking of a way to transcribe these books into test files and I think I've found a way to kill two birds with one stone. As it is, I plan to read these books. Handling them has brought some 'life' back into them, but not enough flexibility for scans. So I ask for your opinions/experience; What is the best voice recognition software at the moment? I wouldn't have any qualms reading these books 'aloud' to transcribe them.

Val is quite clearly doing the Sci Fi Lord's own work with this project, and we here salute him for the sterling work. Many, many more covers are viewable on the Whitechapel board at the link below.

Science fiction karma [Whitechapel]

What the art movies and pulp novels had in common was a warping of logic, even if they didn't always warp it in the same ways. In a novel by Spillane or Philip K. Dick, the story would take a weird swerve just because the author got stuck and then drunk or high. Meanwhile, a movie like Track 42 would just veer off in some bizarre direction just to be arty.

Two or three times a week, I'd sit in the local art-house theater and watch a movie about a man living with the decomposing corpse of his roommate, or an author whose characters crash his appearance on a TV show. Some of the Euro-art movies I watched seemed to dissolve about halfway through into half-naked people pulling faces at the camera, followed by a dinner party or something. I don't think I've ever been so open to the allure of the random, either before or since. The zig-zagness of both forms of entertainment appealed to me because I was trying to form an identity as an adult, and figure out whether I actually possessed a sexuality. Pulps were great because they were heroic and open-ended, while art movies showed how overrated "normal" adulthood really was.

(I didn't actually watch any cult movies in college, because I didn't have a TV or VCR, or access to a decent rep theater.)

Meanwhile, Hollywood movies and "serious" fiction, even genre fiction, had a certain orderliness. You would usually pretty much know where the story was going after the first half hour or 100 pages. And even if the stories were contrived or illogical, at least all the pieces would more or less fit most of the time.

Raymond Chandler famously said that whenever he reached a slow moment in one of his novels, he'd have someone enter the scene, gun in hand, and figure out the hows and whys later.

Every now and then, someone in science fiction (or outside it, in some cases) gets nostalgic for pulp. You see anthologies that are paying homage to scifi pulp, or trying to recapture some kind of monstery spirit of scifi. But usually they just go for the trappings of pulp, the bug-eyed monsters and headgear with fins, and not the sheer randomness of truly great pulp. Meanwhile, you see lots of people doing "slipstream" books and anthologies, which are trying to be the art movies of SF. But sometimes what you end up with is a fairly sedate, if slightly surreal, brand of literary fiction with some speculative elements.

But maybe people should be trying to mash them up more, creating a bizarre hybrid of high and low cultures. With as little irony as possible. Combining the manic-depressiveness of a hastily written pulp novel with the loopiness of art movies could yield something weirder, and more artsy, than any purely literary SF or pulp homage.

I stopped watching art movies years ago, and haven't seen one since, unless you count the Anderson brothers, Wes and P.T.* I also outgrew pulp novels, in favor of literary fiction and smart recent SF. I guess I was finally ready for linear narratives and accessible characters. But I'll still flash on random images, or remember a random gunfight (maybe in space, maybe not) from some book that fell apart as I read it. Those books and movies have a dreamlike quality in my head now, and I wish I found that quality in more scifi nowadays.

* - I know that Wes Anderson and P.T. Anderson aren't brothers.