Welcome back to Unwinnable’s Pulp Book Club. In honor of Halloween, we’re discussing Roger Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October, a relatively recent (1993) novel that chronicles the events of The Game, a month-long magical ceremony that will result in opening the way for the return of Lovecraftian entities into the world – or keep them shut out. The players and their animal familiars are a host of characters from literature, history and film – Jack the Ripper, Dracula, Frankenstein, Rasputin, Sherlock Holmes and more – and The Game is played out through a series of deals, murders and other skullduggery in a rural suburb of Victorian London. (more…)
Hi!
Two things you may or may not know about Unwinnable:
1. We have around 1500 articles in our archive (according to Stu).
2. One staff member (me) has a Masters of Library and Information Science.
Starting this week, once we’ve gotten ready for the weekend, I’ll be publishing a little piece like this that pulls a few stories out for you to read over the weekend. They might not be our best work (we wouldn’t want to raise your expectations too high, now). They could be two years or two weeks old. But there will be a theme. (more…)
Welcome to our new pulp book club – and boy, do we have some back room roscoes to investigate, some broads to pitch woo with and some tiger milk to put down. Confused? You won’t be soon. Get three fingers of that Jameson and light that cigarette with a match on your stubble (ladies, on the leg stubble will do). We are about to go deep, deep into the murky dark, my friends. And to do that, we’ll start at the Black Mask beginning with a little Dashiell Hammett, who first made the hardboiled genre popular with violence, uncompromising characters and the dark shadows of male libido. (more…)
First: Unwinnable columnist Chris Dahlen wrote Mark of the Ninja. Second: Chris asked me once, out of the blue, to bend my freelance librarian skills toward finding him some historical books on ninja. I thought it was weird (who wants to read about ninja that can’t, like, fly?), but, you know, it’s Dahlen. So I did. (more…)
If you pay attention to my bylines (hi, Mom!), you may have noticed you haven’t seen one for a while. The onset of summer is usually a difficult time for me – shorter, warmer nights aren’t pleasant when you’re most comfortable sleeping in a cold, dark room, and when I don’t get enough sleep things start to go sideways. But it’s not just that. (more…)
