My short story, "A Fish Tale", appears in the January 2005 High Pulp
issue of the Mississippi Review.
This issue focuses on high pulp fiction, the nasty stuff that crosses the line and spits blood on your wingtips.
So what is "High" Pulp?
Who says people can't experiment with language and storytelling in the pulp genre? Our best writers have been doing it for quite a while now, but publishers and readers have been a bit slow catching on. Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn turned a few heads several years ago, a literary noir novel that deconstructed hard-boiled language through a Tourette's afflicted private eye. Beyond that, James Ellroy and Ken Bruen write bare bones prose that comes at you like a montage of images and dialogue, doing away with the formality of description. It can happen anywhere. It does. If you care about the characters, you'll stick around regardless. George Pelecanos gave us several novels in which the characters were more interested in telling us about their record collections than in committing crimes. And they were good books, almost documentary-like, maybe even minimalist noir. I'm saying that the formula is busted. Some people still pick it up and tinker with it, repair it now and then, but for the most part, great pulp writers absorbed the basics and have now moved on to find more interesting ways to tell you their stories.
That's what this issue is all about. The stories had to give me a certain feeling. They had to make my eyes go wide, make me say "Wow, I've got to tell someone about this." I wanted these pulp stories to reflect contemporary times instead of nostalgia for the Forties. I wanted them to come across with strong unique voices, the characters giving us the story as only they can do it. I wanted them to be addictive, exciting, full of writing that slaps you silly and makes you like it.
In the primetime of pulp magazines, readers would leave them on trains, in cabs, in bus stations, for someone else to find and enjoy. That's what I'm doing for you now. I'm leaving this issue at our cyber bus station because these stories are too good for me to keep to myself. Besides, the writers would beat the living hell out of me if I tried to do that anyway. I'm really afraid of them all.
A raw in your face story of teenage love, lust, murder, and revenge set in the Bronx in the early seventies, where the cold business world of organize crime melds with the brutality of street gang warlords that ignites a winner takes all battle for u
A jaded cold case investigator finds himself trying to solve a thirty year old mystery when the skeletal remains of two missing teenagers are found in a national park.
Prime-Time Crime Time (600 pages) is a collection of 35 fictional crime/detective stories and the work is author Jay Dubya's 43rd published hardcover/paperback book.
