JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 317 из 359" The pulps, including the so-called "shudder-pulps," of which Weird Tales was the finest exponent, have been long gone from the scene, but they live on in the novel and do a brisk business on paperback racks everywhere.
Many of these modern pulps would have been printed as multipart serials in the pulp magazines that existed roughly from 1910 until about 1950, had they been written during that period. But I wouldn't restrict the label "pulp" simply to genre works of horror, fantasy, science fiction, detective, and western; Arthur Hailey, for instance, seems to me to be writing modern-day pulp. The ingredients are all there, from the inevitable violence to the inevitable maiden in distress. The critics who have regularly toasted Hailey over the coals are the same critics who-infuriatingly enough-see the novel as divisible only into two categories: "literature," which may either succeed or fail upon its merits, and "popular fiction," which always fails, no matter how good it may be ( every now and then a writer such as John D.
MacDonald may be elevated in the critical mind from a writer of "popular fiction" to a writer of "literature," at which point his body of work may be safely reevaluated).
My own idea is that fiction actually falls into three main categories: literature, mainstream fiction, and pulp fiction-and that to categorize does not end the critic's job but only gives him or her a place to set his or her feet. To label a novel "pulp" is not the same as saying it's a bad novel, or will give the reader no pleasure. Of course we will readily accept that most pulp fiction is indeed bad; there is not a great deal one can say in defense of such brass oldies from the pulp era as William Shelton's "Seven Heads of Bushongo" or "Satan's Virgin," by Ray Cummings.* On the other hand, though, Dashiell Hammett published extensively in the pulps (most notably in the highly regarded Black Mask , where contemporaries Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Cornell Woolrich also published); Tennessee Williams's first published work, a vaguely Lovecraftian tale titled "The Vengeance of Nitocris," appeared in an early issue of Weird Tales ; Bradbury broke in by way of the same market; so did MacKinlay Kantor, who would go on to write Andersonville .
To condemn pulp writing out of hand is like condemning a girl as loose simply because she comes from unpleasant family circumstances. The fact that supposedly reputable critics both in the genre and outside it continue to do so makes me both sad and angry. James Herbert is not a nascent Tennessee Williams only waiting for the right time to spin a cocoon and emerge as a great figure of modern literature; he is what he is and that's all that he is, as Popeye would say.
My point is simply that what he is, is good enough.
Many of these modern pulps would have been printed as multipart serials in the pulp magazines that existed roughly from 1910 until about 1950, had they been written during that period. But I wouldn't restrict the label "pulp" simply to genre works of horror, fantasy, science fiction, detective, and western; Arthur Hailey, for instance, seems to me to be writing modern-day pulp. The ingredients are all there, from the inevitable violence to the inevitable maiden in distress. The critics who have regularly toasted Hailey over the coals are the same critics who-infuriatingly enough-see the novel as divisible only into two categories: "literature," which may either succeed or fail upon its merits, and "popular fiction," which always fails, no matter how good it may be ( every now and then a writer such as John D.
MacDonald may be elevated in the critical mind from a writer of "popular fiction" to a writer of "literature," at which point his body of work may be safely reevaluated).
My own idea is that fiction actually falls into three main categories: literature, mainstream fiction, and pulp fiction-and that to categorize does not end the critic's job but only gives him or her a place to set his or her feet. To label a novel "pulp" is not the same as saying it's a bad novel, or will give the reader no pleasure. Of course we will readily accept that most pulp fiction is indeed bad; there is not a great deal one can say in defense of such brass oldies from the pulp era as William Shelton's "Seven Heads of Bushongo" or "Satan's Virgin," by Ray Cummings.* On the other hand, though, Dashiell Hammett published extensively in the pulps (most notably in the highly regarded Black Mask , where contemporaries Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Cornell Woolrich also published); Tennessee Williams's first published work, a vaguely Lovecraftian tale titled "The Vengeance of Nitocris," appeared in an early issue of Weird Tales ; Bradbury broke in by way of the same market; so did MacKinlay Kantor, who would go on to write Andersonville .
To condemn pulp writing out of hand is like condemning a girl as loose simply because she comes from unpleasant family circumstances. The fact that supposedly reputable critics both in the genre and outside it continue to do so makes me both sad and angry. James Herbert is not a nascent Tennessee Williams only waiting for the right time to spin a cocoon and emerge as a great figure of modern literature; he is what he is and that's all that he is, as Popeye would say.
My point is simply that what he is, is good enough.