The Blood 'n' Thunder Guide to Pulp Fiction

The top-selling, best-reviewed title in Murania Press history is now available in a newly revised and expanded edition! With nearly 2000 copies in print, sold in 23 countries, THE BLOOD 'N' THUNDER GUIDE TO PULP FICTION has been acclaimed one of the foremost (the foremost, in the opinion of some) reference books covering the subject. During the 20th century's first half, millions of Americans flocked to newsstands every month in search of thrills provided by all-fiction magazines printed on cheap pulp paper. These periodicals introduced and popularized such famous characters as Tarzan, Zorro, Sam Spade, Buck Rogers, Doc Savage, Hopalong Cassidy, and Conan the Barbarian, to name just a few. The producers of pulp fiction churned out their vigorous and occasionally outré stories at a feverish pace, generally for a mere penny per word. Some eventually graduated from the pulps to become world-famous, best-selling authors-among them Edgar Rice Burroughs, Max Brand, Erle Stanley Gardner, Ray Bradbury, Louis L'Amour, Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler. Often derided in their own time, the "rough paper" magazines had an incalculable effect on American pop culture. They gave birth to modern science fiction and the hardboiled detective story, but also to plot devices, character types, and storytelling innovations that live on in today's most popular novels, movies, and TV shows. Illustrated with 750 magazine covers and original paintings, THE BLOOD 'N' THUNDER GUIDE TO PULP FICTION presents a complete and lively history of this unique literary form, covering genres individually and identifying key titles, authors, and stories. It also offers advice on collecting the vintage magazines and directs readers to recently published reprints of classic pulp. This handbook is a perfect companion piece to 2017's THE ART OF THE PULPS, co-edited by Ed Hulse. Along with addressing previous omissions and making editorial corrections, we've added nearly 10,000 words of new copy (recently uncovered facts and additional analysis) to the existing manuscript. We've also included more cover reproductions, among them at least a half dozen important first issues left out of the original 2013 edition. What's more, we've updated the four appendices, which offer carefully-compiled lists of mass-market pulp-fiction anthologies, reference books about the pulps, small-press publishers specializing in rough-paper fiction reprints, and a collector's guide to building a comprehensive pulp-magazine collection. Perhaps most importantly, the book now has a complete index - the lack of which was the only substantive complaint we've ever received about the earlier GUIDE. The new material has been added (without significantly increasing the book's page count and list price) by slightly reducing the text's font size, thus getting more words per page. We also filled blank pages that previously separated chapters. The 2013 GUIDE had 414 pages, the 2018 revision has 428.