As a long-time fan of H.P. Lovecraft and weird tales, I had gotten a recommendation to check out a new fanzine devoted to similar works: The Bizarchives. Subtitled “Weird Tales of Monsters, Magic and Machines,” it collects short stories that are inspired by Weird Tales and similar pulp magazines, and collects Lovecraftian tales, horror, sword and sorcery, sf (often with horror overtones), etc.
The magazine is put out by Dave Martel, who does a podcast/YouTube channel with a show called The Bog. It comes from his own Midgard Institute of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature.
At this time, three issues of The Bizarchives are out, and I picked up the first from Amazon.
The first issue, dated August 2021, has 14 stories by several authors. I’m not familiar with any of them, and sadly, we don’t get bios on all of them.
We kick things off with a short intro that tries to explain “pulp fiction.” It’s okay but flawed. We again get the mistake of assuming pulp fiction means short stories. And pulp fiction lasted from 1900 to 1950, and covered a wide range of genres, but the focus here seems to be on weird fiction and on the period around the Great Depression and the world wars. This is a bit myopic, as pulp fiction was much wider. Often we forget that romance and sometimes western were the top-selling genres. Weird fiction was very much a niche genre.
Yes, pulp fiction is popular fiction. Yes, Weird Tales each month outsold The Great Gatsby. But the “big four” of pulps way outsold Weird Tales, which actually struggled for most of its existence. Certainly, their enthusiasm for the pulps is there, but let’s get the facts correct, too.
Anyway, I read several of the stories and all the ones I read were pretty good. One is marked as “Chapter 1,” so assume this will be a serial, but for how long? It was an sf tale set in the future and was a little hard to grasp the world-building going on. Another tale seems to be the first of a sword-and-sorcery “hero” who fights monsters, named Lex (he is in the next two issues). Other tales were weird tales, sf/horror, horror, and the like.
Overall, this is a nice collection. I want to make that clear. I’m not sure if I’ll get the next one, but that’s more due to my tastes and what I am reading than criticism to what we get here.
I think the authors here are good enough to get themselves published in some of the other New Pulp anthologies out there like Cirsova and the like, and maybe some have. It looks like from the bios that a few have done their own work. So certainly check out the ones you liked. I’ll keep my eye on this one, and may pick up the next one to be sure the quality has continued. As noted, there are two more volumes out now.
