I feel like Pulp used to be a dirty word.

I don’t know, maybe it still is. The adventure, detective, western, and fantasy dime novels and magazines of the early 1900s were always passed over by myself when perusing the thrift shop or antique store as a child; instead, I reached for a thick sci-fi “best of” compilation or the bright flashy comic books of the 90s that my cousins were always reading. Weird Tales? No thanks. Spawn? I’ll buy that (which, let's be honest, is also pretty much pulp, rightly defined). And that’s only when I didn’t have a Michael Crichton novel in my hands, mind you. But I’ve started reading Pulp in earnest lately; mostly Sword & Sorcery, some Westerns, the occasional Sci-Fi romp.

Pulp fiction’s (the genre, not the movie) focus on visceral action and laundry list of clichés has in the past been put to me as “ameatuerish” or “simple” by professors and fellow writers. The focus is on not backstory, but instead action: the rolling introductions and development doled out selectively as characters meet challenge after challenge head on. It’s engaging and punchy– more so than the first 70 pages of the novel I set down and stopped reading last week.
After relating that experience, a friend asked me: “Then what makes you keep reading a book, not put it down?” I answered, “It has to make me smile.” And that’s it– I want to read something, anything, that puts such a mind-boggling image in my head I can’t help but physically react to it. And I can get that from anywhere: from Aristotle, from Crichton; from a comic book, from a drabble, from a haiku.

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