Pulp Fans attention

Paiso Publishing, a magazine and game publisher, is establishing a line of books that will hopefully acquaint modern readers with some of the important books that have shaped contemporary fantasy. You mean this stuff wasn't thunk up in 1992? The line will be calld Planet Stories. Nice.

Among the titles that will be offered are

Almuric Robert E. Howard
City of The Beast/Warrior of Mars Michael Moorcock
Black God's Kiss C.L. Moore
Elak of Atlantis Henry Kuttner
The Secret of Sinharat Leigh Brackett

The only selection I'd quibble with is the Moorcock. Certainly he's a great writer but I don't recall his Edgar Rice Burroughs "homage" being all that memorable. Of course I read it in the Sixties when dope and drink had me communicating with Mars in a way John Carter never imagined possible. There are several other Moorcock straight adventure fantasies that are timeless classics.

The selections of Moore and Kuttner are timely for me because I've been reading their three "Lewis Padgett" mysteries. There is always the problem with the Kuttners of who wrote what. At what point did Catherine take over the writing; and at what point did Henry sit down to spell her.

The odd thing--and I may be entirely wrong here--is that the mysteries don't read like either of them, making me wonder if they were farmed out, the way Man Drowning by "Henry Kuttner" was. I still have a difficult time believing that Cleve Cartmill was the ghost. And I'm sorry for him if it was because he never did much for me until this book, which turned out to be one of the most spirtually spooky hardboiled novels I've ever read. The love story is painfully true and the scenes in the desert with the madwoman haunting.