The 2024 Windy City Pulp and Paper Convention was held in April, and the new Windy City Pulp Stories #23 is out. This issue is again available through Amazon, as are most going back to #8, and published by Black Dog Books.
This year, the focus is on “weird menace,” a genre within the pulps that originally came from Popular Publications magazines started with Dime Detective and later picked up by the spicies, Red Circle and Thrilling, among others. This genre mixed in horror elements with detective like stories. Pulp historian Will Murray kicks things off with a nice article on this genre from its origins in 1933 until its demise in 1941, touching on the main creators and writers, as well as the main pulps and publishers.
The rest is mainly made up of a several non-fiction reprints, first with a set of five on the genre. We get articles by Wyatt Blassingame, Jack Williamson, Erle Stanley Gardner, Harry Adler, and Bruce Henry. These are taken from Writer’s Digest, Author and Journalist, and The American Mercury from 1936 to 1939. Most are focused on how to write weird menace stories from authors who did so.
We also get a couple of articles from The Bookman in 1911 and 1916 on editors and the works they reject. I think these are probably the earliest works I can recall reading on this topic. The second one was most interesting, as it is a longer work made up of several short pieces by editors of many pulp and non-pulp literary magazines of the period.
Rounding out the volume are some memorials for Roger Hill (1948-2023). And finally, there’s Ed Hulse‘s article on the movies being shown at the show.
Always a welcome addition to my library of reference works. While weird menace isn’t a particular interest of mine, its always good to learn more about the wide world of pulps.
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