1980s Sword and Sorcery Films

1980
Hawk the Slayer

1981
The Archer and the Sorcerer aka The Archer: Fugitive from the Empire
Dragonslayer
Excalibur

1982
Ator the Fighting Eagle
Beastmaster
Conan the Barbarian
Gunan, King of the Barbarians
Hero
Sangraal - Barbarian Master
Sorceress
The Sword and the Sorceror
Sword of the Barbarians

1983
Deathstalker
Fire and Ice
Hearts and Armor
Hundra
Ironmaster
Krull
Thor the Conqueror
Throne of Fire

1984
The Blade Master aka Cave Dwellers
Conan the Destroyer
Sword of the Valiant
Tunka el Guerrero
The Warrior and the Sorceress

1985
Barbarian Queen
Legend
Red Sonya
Wizards of the Lost Kingdom

1986
Amazons

1987
The Barbarians
Deathstalker II
Gor
Iron Warrior
Stormquest

1988
Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell
Outlaw of Gor
Willow

1989
Avalon
Wizards of the Lost Kingdom II

1990
Barbarian Queen II: The Empress Strikes Back
Quest for the Mighty Sword
Time Barbarians

1991
Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time
Deathstalker IV: Match of Titans

Not included are similar films set in the Iron Age or after the apocalypse, as well as any kids' movies.

The Ultimate Slavesploitation Novel list

Slavesploitation, also called Plantationploitation, Plantation Porn, or Plantation Gothic, is a genre that spun out of the 1957 book Mandingo.  At its core the genre is about proper white ladies banging black slaves in the 19th century, wrapped up in a package of historical romance/adventure.  It also intersects a vein of Southern Gothic, with themes of incest, torture, murder, and family sagas.

While these had a female audience and had covers that mirrored romance novels, the books also have a strong male audience, including an African American one.  While trashy and exploitative to the bone, they at least acknowledged the evils of slavery, and aren't as near as morally objectionable as racist trash like Gone With the Wind.

Through the 70s the genre became more adventure oriented, with escaped slaves becoming pirates or revolutionaries, and settings began to include the Caribbean.  The genre came to an abrupt stop by the mid 80s, with at least one series (Bloodheart) seeming to change genres by the end.  The thirst for interracial historical romance seemed to be diverted to native American romances with the word Savage in the title - Zebra printed more of these than horror in the 80s.


Links are to AbeBooks for paperbacks, or Amazon the few titles available for Kindle.

Series titles:

Falconhurst
1957 Mandingo by Kyle Onstott
1962 Drum by Kyle Onstott
1964 Master of Falconhurst by Kyle Onstott
1966 Falconhurst Fancy by Lance Horner
1967 The Mustee by Lance Horner
1968 Heir to Falconhurst by Lance Horner
1971 Flight to Falconhurst by Lance Horner
1973 Mistress of Falconhurst by Lance Horner
1978 Taproots of Falconhurst by Ashley Carter
1980 Scandal of Falconhurst by Ashley Carter
1983 Rogue of Falconhurst by Ashley Carter
1985 Miz Lucretia of Falconhurst by Ashley Carter
1986 Mandingo Master by Ashley Carter

Blackoaks by Ashley Carter (Harry Whittington)
1976 Master of Blackoaks
1978 Secret of Blackoaks
1981 Heritage of Blackoaks
1984 Farewell to Blackoaks

Wyndward by Norman Daniels
1978 Wyndward Passion
1978 Wyndward Fury
1981 Wyndward Peril
1981 Wyndward Glory
1984 Forever Wyndward

Black Royal aka Black Lord, Black Master by Stuart Jason (some of whom are Michael Avallone, but I'm not untangling all that here) - these all reference each other in the covers or elsewhere, so presumably they're the same series, but I gave up trying to piece together the order or original publishing dates.  Some of these may be retitlings of the same story.
Black Lord
Black Lust
Black Prince
Black Master
Black Emperor
Black Love aka Black Lover
Royal Stud
Royal Master
Black Rebel (omnibus of Black Lord, Black Master, and Black Emperor)

Chane by Norman Gant
1968 Chane
1968 Black Vengeance aka Vengeance of Chane
1969 Slave Empire
1971 Wrath of Chane (omnibus containing Chane, Black Vengeance, and Slave Empire)

Dragonard by Rupert Gilchrist
1976 Dragonard
1976 The Master of Dragonard Hill
1976 Dragonard Blood
1978 Dragonard Rising
1979 The Siege of Dragonard Hill
1980 Guns of Dragonard

Slaves Without Masters by Rupert Gilchrist

1982 House At Three O'clock

1983 A Girl Called Friday Night

1985 The Wrong Side Of Town

Sabrehill by Raymond Giles
1974 Sabrehill
1975 Slaves of Sabrehill
1976 Rebels of Sabrehill
1981 Storm Over Sabrehill
1982 Hellcat of Sabrehill

Captain Jacob King by Leslie Gladson - I've gotten conflicting information about the years and order of this series - it appears to have run between 1968 and 1971
1968 Slaver 
King's Slaves 
The Abolitionist 
Beast 

Golden Stud by Lance Horner
1975 Six-Fingered Stud reworked into Golden Stud
1977 Sword of the Golden Stud

The Plantation by George McNeill
1975 The Plantation
1977 Rafaella
1978 The Hellions
1983 White Trash

Bloodheart by Richard Tresillian - note: while Bloodheart is packaged as slavesploitation, Bloodheart Feud is packaged as intra-racial historical romance. This appears to be set in Sri Lanka, so it might only be thematically similar.
1985 Bloodheart
1986 Bloodheart Royal
1987 Bloodheart Feud

Bondmaster by Richard Tresillian
1977 Bondmaster 
1977 Blood of the Bondmaster
1978 The Bondmaster Breed
1982 Bondmaster Fury
1983 The Bondmaster's Revenge
1984 Bondmaster Buck

Fleshtraders aka Black River by Richard Tresillian aka Raynard Devine
1984 Master of Black River
198? Black River Affair
1985 Black River Breed
1985 Revenge at Black River by Raynard Devine

Shame and Glory by Jerrold Mundis as Eric Corder
1967 Slave
1968 The Long Tattoo
1969 Slave Ship
1972 Hellbottom
1976 Savage Rite aka Running Dogs
1978 Shame and Glory (Omnibus)

Vane by Jeanne Wilson

1976 Weep in the Sun

1977 Troubled Heritage

Beulah Land Trilogy by Lonnie Coleman

1973 Beulah Land

1977 Look Away, Beulah Land

1980 The Legacy of Beulah Land

Ebony Masters by Simon Lascaux

1985 Chains of Rage

1986 Bonds of Shame

Dester Granville by Parley Cooper

1976 Dark Desires

1981 Golden Fever

1987 Grand Deception

Non-series titles (or I couldn't tell)

1978 Chains by Justin Adams (Lou Cameron)

1968 The Slave by Alston Anderson - this may have been a more serious piece, but at least the NEL cover is exploitative.

Roger Blake (aka James Moffat)
1978 Black Reaper
1979 Black Fury 
1979 Black Summer 

Harold Calin
1969 Black Cargo
1969 The Black and the Damned
1970 Black Hell
1977 Slave Ship

Leo Callan
1980 Black Sapphire
1980 Black Temptress
1981 Black Rebel

1983 The Outlanders by Ashley Carter

1974 Chindera aka Brown Sugar by Nancy Cato

Joseph Chadwick
1970 Black Velvet
1971 Sabrina

Lou Cameron (some may be in a series)
1968 Mistress of Bayou LaBelle
1969 Ashanti

Jonathan Craig

1970 Quadroon

Norman Daniels
1970 Slave Rebellion
1970 Voodoo Slave
1973 Jubal 

1978 Eulalie by Julie Ellis

Peter Gentry (Kerry Newcomb)
1976 Rafe 
1977 Titus Gamble 

Raymond Giles
1970 Dark Master by Raymond Giles
1973 Rogue Black by Raymond Giles

1969 Generation of Blood by I. A. Grenville

1971 Machismo by Gramm Hall

1969 Muscavado by Eleanor Loise Heckert

1969 Mantee by Robert J. Hensler

1969 The Long Whip by John Hicks

Lance Horner
1969 The Mahound by Lance Horner
1975 Six-Fingered Stud by Lance Horner - reworked into 1975 Golden Stud by Lance Horner

Stuart Jason (unknown if any of these are connected to the Black Royal series)
1969 Black Hercules
1969 Kingblood

1969 Beauty Beast by MacKinlay Kantor

1969 Slaves by John O. Killens

1976 Chinaberry by William Lavender

1973 Jeb by Jeffrey Lord (Michael Avallone?)

1977 The Unconquered by Margaret Maitland

1969 Plantation Breed by Hugo Paul

1969 The Stonehedge Slaves by Clement Purvis aka Gardner F. Fox (yes, the DC Comics writer)

Kenneth Roberts
1969 Blaze
1970 Flame
1978 Black Fire

Clint Rockman aka Kenneth Bulmer - These may be all related, most are about black pirate women.
1972 Black Slaver 
1972 Black Queen
1972 Black Gold
1972 Black Ivory
1973 Sable Diana 
1974 Sable Adventure 
1974 Sable Mistress 
1979 Sable Ivory (omnibus of Black Ivory and Sable Mistress)

1969 Fury by Mark Swanson

Robert Tralins (may be in a series)
1969 Runaway Slave aka Rampage
1969 Black Brute aka Black Stud
1971 Black Pirate
1970 Slave King
1974 Slave's Revenge
1977 Black Roots (omnibus of Black Stud, Rampage and Slave's Revenge)1980 Panther
1981 Chains

Richard Tresillian
1979 Fleur

1988 Giselle (may be plantation light)

1973 Voodoo Queen by Adam Turner

Boyd Upchurch

1968 The Slave Stealer

Robert Vaughan
1971 Mistress Of The Lash

1972 Slave's Blood

Lionel Webb
1968 Sparhawk by Lionel Webb
1968 Rogue Black by Lionel Webb
1970 Sebastian by Lionel Webb
1974 The Blackbirder by Lionel Webb
1977 The Flame and the Fury by Lionel Webb
1977 Night of Dark Fires by Lionel Webb

Jeanne Wilson

1976 Mulatto

Seem like slavesploitation but aren't:

1956 The Street of the Sun by Lance Horner
1963 The Tattooed Road by Lance Horner
1967 The African by Harold Courlander
1971 Swamp Girl by Evans Wall 
1978 Panama by Ashley Carter

Movies based on these novels include: Mandingo, Drum, Dragonard, and Slaves, as well as original films that I won't go into here.

As of this writing, George McNeill and Peter Gentry (Kerry Newcomb) are the only authors with ebooks in print.

Genre Overview: Tie In Novels

As literary snobs look down at genre fiction, even lower down in the caste is the sometimes baffling, usually horrible world of media tie ins.

These include straight novelizations, which can be interesting when they divert from the original source, often due to being based on a early screenplay, or because they provide more depth and background than the original.  Film novelizations date back to the silent film era.

"Tie in" is also used to describe when the novel came first, then there's a movie, and the original is reissued, though these only differ from the original by the cover.

Then there's the world of continuing stories and expanded universes.  The hundreds of Star Wars and Star Trek novels are the most well known examples, but continuing adventure novels exist for everything from Friday the 13th to the Partridge Family.

Tie ins and novelizations aren't limited to novels based on films.  There are novels based on video games, TV shows, role playing games, and comic books.  They can stack multiple levels, such as a novelization of a movie version of a video game (Doom by John Shirley), or the novelization of a comic spin-off from a movie series (multiple Aliens titles).  The most spun off spin off to my knowledge is the fourteen book series Salem's Tails, a spin off of the 50+ novelization series of the Sabrina the Teenage Witch live action show, a reboot of a cartoon spun off of another cartoon based on a comic.

I'll be doing a deep dive in the world of media tie-ins, focusing on adultish novels and less on comics and children's adaptations.

Genre Overview: True Crime

True Crime as a popular genre developed from pamphlets published in the 16th century, and is one of the first genres of literature consumed by the newly literate lower classes.  Sensational accounts of crime, mostly murder with the occasional rape or heist, often with little interest in factual accuracy.

Through the 19th century, true crime and detective fiction influenced each other.  Periodicals emerged: the Police Gazette (1845-1877) and True Detective (1924-), and Truman Capote gave the novel-length True Crime book some unearned credibility with In Cold Blood in 1966.

There's a blurred line between crime reporting and True Crime as we know today.  There are non-fiction books about crime and criminals which stick to facts in evidence.  On the other end, we have "based on a true story" and "ripped from the headlines" fare ranging from Dragnet to Law & Order.

And in between, we have True Crime, which tends towards sensationalism, artistic license, and just plain making stuff up.  The full books tend to be the worst offenders, probably from the need for padding.  Even if the facts are roughly accurate, the reader is given full quoted conversations and even interior monologues, which are clearly invented from whole cloth to give the events a narrative feel.

The audience for True Crime seems to have shifted dramatically in the last few decades - True Crime magazines were borderline softcore porn for men for over a century, but now the audience for things like Discovery ID and Serial seem to be more female.

There are a lot of elements I find distasteful in True Crime.  There's often a refusal to acknowledge police and prosecutorial misconduct and incompetence, and a smug sense of superiority over the loathsome criminal, which seems like an easy target.  There's a lack of ambiguity, as if all cases are not only solvable, but all facts are knowable, down to the thoughts running through a victims' head before they die.  And the padding, lord, the padding.  Very few cases have enough information to fill an entire book on their own.

In terms of non-fiction, I enjoy the Crime Library, which lives on thanks to the Wayback Machine.  Short on padding, long on gruesome detail.

For proper True Crime, my favorite era is the pulpy magazines, especially from the 1960s through 80s.  True Detective, Front Page Detective, Master Detective, etc.  These are consumed best, I find, like professional wrestling.  We know it didn't happen that way, but we're kind of pretending it's true for the story.  Read as fiction, I enjoy the stories as they don't conform with literary formulas.  I can usually guess the outcome of TV mysteries by counting the number of red herrings.  In real life (and fake stuff based on real life), people don't make any damn sense.  These are not bad people acting rationally in their best self-interest.  These are bad people acting impulsively because they're crazy and stupid.

By the 90s the focus, especially on TV, was towards the investigation and prosecution, but the True Crime magazines kept on the good stuff - the criminals and their crimes.  Unfortunately, these magazines do not have a high internet presence.  Ironically, there are more True Crime magazines from the pulp era available than from 40 years ago.

The best source I've found are in the "From the Files Of" reprints that came out starting in the 80s.  Names to look for include John Dunning, David Jacobs, Rose G. Mandelsberg, and Art Crockett.

Genre Overview: High Fantasy

High Fantasy is set in an alternate history or planet, set in the equivalent of the dark ages through the renaissance, with non-human intelligent races, monsters, and magic.  Lord of the Rings and everything that's ripped off Lord of the Rings.  It's different from Sword & Sorcery (Conan and stuff that rips off Conan), mainly in the amount of clothing worn on the book cover, but there are literary differences I'm not nuanced enough to explain.  It may be the same as Epic Fantasy, or Epic may just be a subset of High.

I should love this stuff.  I loved the Rankin Bass TV specials, and listened to the Hobbit storybook album obsessively.  I played D&D.  Hell, I even liked Willow.  But I could never stomach the fiction.  I read the Hobbit, but got to the first poem in Fellowship of the Ring before giving up.

This is purely a matter of my tastes, but these things seem to be hundreds of thousands of words of people walking from one place to another.  While the movies and video games are all hack & slash, the books seem to be G-rated.

Somewhere in the stretch between the paperback explosion of the 60s & 70s to self-publishing today, there must be something that suits my tastes.  Short (or at least reasonable), violent, gory, exploitive, and fun.  Tie-ins seem to be more readable, but tend towards the young adult side.

So, dear readers, please fill me in on what I'm missing.  And don't tell me about grimdark.  That's just High Fantasy with more dirt smudges.

Genre Overview: Men's Adventure Magazines

Sometimes called, either derisively or affectionately, the Sweats, Men's Adventure Magazines ran from the early 50's through the late 60's, though some managed in one form or another through the late 70's.  The featured mostly "true story" type fiction, though there was usually a very thin pretense to how true it actually was.  The tone was ridiculously hyper-masculine, to the point where it's almost impossible to parody.  At least 50 titles began with the word Man or Men.

While the genre in many ways replaced the pulp magazines that had all but died out, the tone and feel were quite different, and there weren't a lot of authors who made the transition, having either quit writing, moved on to paperback originals, or drank themselves to death.  Likewise, with few exceptions, the writers of Men's Adventure magazines didn't move on to the Men's Adventure Paperbacks, a much different beast.  The only author to move up to any level of respectability was The Godfather's Mario Puzo.

Men's Adventure Magazines had their own feel and pace, developed due to the quick page count.  A situation and characters are introduced in a paragraph or two, there's a big action scene, and a brief epilogue.  There were longer stories, but they tended not to hold up as well.

First person narrative was very common, given the "true story" background.  In many ways, they had more in common with the True Confessions genre of women's magazines than the detective or adventure pulps.  This is especially evident in the amazing story titles: "I Was a Sex Gang Flunky for the Nazi She Demon", etc.

In addition to the machismo, there's the sadism.  Some magazines kept it clean, but others reveled in cruelty and torture.  And Nazis, lots of Nazis.

There were a few stock story topics, such as:

• Exotic adventure
• Mob/Crime stories
• Animal attacks (Weasels Ripped my Flesh, etc)
• War stories
• Nazi atrocities
• Westerns
• Sex exposes

There were also "health" articles preying on men's sexual insecurities, with titles like "Why Your Lesbian Wife Would Rather Sleep With Communist Hippies" and the like.

The rise and decline of Men's Adventure Magazines tends to follow the trajectory of sexploitation movies.  In film, we had Nude Cuties, the sadistic Roughies, hard core porn with actual stories, then just people doing it.

"Gentleman's" magazines like Playboy ran on a parallel track, and only a couple Men's Adventure magazines grew from earlier nudie mags (Sir! is the only one I can think of).  If you look over the covers (Galactic Central is a good place), every title that survives into the 60s starts slipping in photos of half naked women on the cover for a year or so before the painted action scenes are dropped altogether.

More and more page length was given to nude pictures, and the titles either dropped completely or became full blown spank mags.  A few of them, such as Sir! and Male, had some fiction up to the late 70's, before the text either disappeared or became pure sexology.

The lurid covers get most of the attention nowadays, but recently some of the texts have been reprinted as well.  Click on the links below for the Amazon pages.

Cover galleries and overviews:

It's A Man's World: Men's Adventure Magazines, The Postwar Pulps, Expanded Edition
Bruce Minney: The Man Who Painted Everything

Story reprints:

A Handful of Hell: Classic War and Adventure Stories
Cryptozoology Anthology: Strange and Mysterious Creatures in Men's Adventure Magazines
He-Men, Bag Men & Nymphos: Classic Men's Adventure Stories
Weasels Ripped My Flesh! Two-Fisted Stories From Men's Adventure Magazines
Soft Flesh And Orgies Of Death: Fiction, Features & Art From Classic Men's Adventure Magazines
Soft Nudes For The Devil's Butcher: Fiction, Features And Art From Classic Men's Adventure Magazines
Soft Brides For The Beast Of Blood: Fiction, Features And Art From Classic Men's Adventure Magazines

And if you need a non-stop infusion of machismo, visit the Trash Menace Gallery, with over seven hours of cover slideshows.

Conte Cruel - Genre Overview

Conte Cruel, or Cruel Tale, was a genre of short fiction, part of the decadent movement of late 19th century France, though the term also refers to certain story elements that persist today.  The main element seems to be an ironic twist ending that subjects the main character to the cruelty of fate.

I haven't read any proper Conte Cruel stories, but the form reportedly degenerated to it's most vulgar form in stories that were adapted to Grand Guignol - so naturally that's the side of things I'm most interested in.

Conte Cruel found it's way into suspense radio, EC Comics, and TV horror anthologies, though seems to have missed a lot of the pulps.  Weird Menace had twist endings, but usually of the "it was his uncle all along" type, not Burgess Meredith's glasses breaking.

Some translated reprints of the classic French stories are below:

Thirty Hours with a Corpse: and Other Tales of the Grand Guignol by Maurice Level

The Scaffold by Jean-Marie-Mathias Villiers de l'Isle-Adam

The Vampires of London by Angelo de Sorr

The Crazy Corner by Jean Richepin

Champavert: Immoral Tales by Pétrus Borel

The Vampire Soul and Other Sardonic Tales by Auguste Villiers De L'Isle-Adam

African American Men's Adventure

Men's Adventure paperbacks cashed in on the Blaxploitation craze just like James Bond did with Live and Let Die and Marvel did with Luke Cage.  Most of these books fed directly off this trend, and a few fed back into it.

First, here's what I'm not going to talk about -

I'm purposely leaving out some masters in AA crime fiction, such as Chester Himes, Iceberg Slim, and Donald Goines.  These are the class acts, the Ian Flemings and Mickey Spillanes to the Nick Carters and Don Pendletons.

I'm also leaving out some more straightforward detective and cop fiction.

Several of the series below have AA authors, some most definitely don't.  This is more about the genre, not the creators.

Superspade by BB Johnson
6 books 1970-1

This one seems to predate the Blaxploitation film craze, but seems to have the same vibe.

Shaft by Ernest Tidyman
7 books 1971-5

Yeah, that Shaft.  The one that started (or at least popularized) it all.  Too bad they didn't make a movie out of "Shaft Among the Jews".

Iceman by Joseph Nazel
7 books 1973-5

A pimp and casino owner that fought the mob.  Gotta get me some of these.

Nazel also wrote several stand-alone books that would fit here - I'll have to do some more research to give him justice.  Some appear to be novelizations of films such as Black Gestapo and Black Exorcist - I think the movies came first, Nazel doesn't have any screen credits in IMDB.

Murder Master by Joseph Rosenberger
3 books 1973-4

Haven't read these, but I desperately want to.  I'm sure they handle race relations and dialogue in the sensitivity and respectful manner we've come to expect from Rosenberger.  I kid - he's a horrible racist and I'm sure these are horrible.  Still want to read them.

Black Samurai by Marc Olden
8 books 1974-5

American GI Robert Sand gets trained by Japanese Samurai and becomes a secret agent.  Made into an Al Adamson film with Jim Kelly in 1977.  This is the only series here available in ebook.

Black Angel by James D. Laurence
4 books 1975

The only female AA Men's Adventure character I know of.  I have no idea if she's like Pam Grier, but I'm hoping yes.

Aubrey Knight by Stephen Barnes
3 books 1983-93

Outside the genre, but I wanted to mention it.  This is a scifi action series about a null-gravity boxer in the future or something.

Am I missing anything?

Don't Fake the Steamfunk

As you'll recall, the -punk suffix means "modern fiction written to emulate the science fiction written in the past".  It has nothing to do with Richard Hell.  The -funk suffix in the same context means "see above, only with black folk".

Some of it is straightforward new pulp or fill-in-the-blank-punk with black characters.  Some deal with social issues of the time period, unlike mainstream steampunk which tends to idealize the past, but from what I've seen politics takes a back seat to action and entertainment.

Some authors mix in fantasy elements from both Africa and the American south, or use historical and folk characters like Harriet Tubman and John Henry.

A related genre is Sword and Soul - think Conan, but set in a mythical Africa of the past.

Some names to look for - Charles R. Saunders, Milton Davis, Balogun Ojetade, and Valjeanne Jeffers

Steampunks, Get Off the Grass

I like Victorian era science fiction.  I like some modern day science fiction in the same style.  I dig retrofutrism.  I hate steampunk.

Maybe that's too harsh.  The actual movies, books, and general aesthetic I enjoy.  What gets under my skin is steampunk as some kind of subculture, specifically how I hear about its "rising popularity" every couple of years.

The first thing that annoys me is the "-punk" suffix.  It made some sense when originally used in cyberpunk, but it's spiraled into meaninglessness, kind of like how all indie bands were in some obscure "-core" genre.  It kind of fit with splatterpunk, but decopunk should not be a word.  Dieselpunk sounded stupid and obscure until I figured out it meant "Sci-fi from and set in the 1920-40s, but written today".  Then you get your stonepunk (caveman days), clockpunk (Renaissance), atompunk (1950s-60s).  I would make a joke about nowpunk, but neologist Bruce Sterling beat me to it.  Instead I'd like to introduce my series of science fiction about hackers on the fringes of society that have implants in their brains that allow them to interface directly with computer networks, written in the style of 1980s books by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.  I'll call it cyberpunkpunk.  If that isn't already a thing, it will be.

Such things are largely meaningless in the 21st Century, but there is nothing edgy about steampunk.  Disney embraced it at Disneyland Paris back in 1992 while hipsters and nerds found out about it with 1999's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the same year Will Smith's Wild Wild West came out.  It was uncool long before it was cool.

Bleeding Edge!

Meanwhile, steampunk has spun off into some weird directions.  There's a collection of steampunk Sarah Palin cheesecake and more than one steampunk mime band.

Mainly it gives me bad flashbacks to some of the idiots that embraced cyberpunk a couple decades ago.  I knew a guy that had a tall stack of issues of 2600.  He would go through the dumpster in the back of Radio Shack, take apart old calculators, and sew circuit boards into his jacket.  He did not own a computer.  There was also a guy that would show up places in a full blown Borg outfit.  These people were idiots.  As is the guy in a waistcoat that held up my bus this morning because he kept missing the coin slot because he couldn't see through his welding goggles.

Weird Menace

During the thirties and early forties, peaking from 1934-7, there was a glorious period in the pulps where the promises of the lurid pulp covers came true in the content of the stories.  Weird Menace, also called the Shudder Pulps, evolved out of the detective pulps and influenced by Grand Guignol theater.  The stories were formulaic in the extreme, and reading these tales in collections by author can get very repetitive.

They're told almost exclusively in first person by an average Joe.  He, usually accompanied by his fiance, visit some small town to cash in on an inheritance or such.  Some kind of supernatural menace threatens them, with a variation having the hero thinking he is responsible.  The hero is captured or knocked out, his girl is disrobed and faces a grisly end, before the villain is revealed to be mortal and after land/inheritance/the girl, in what is now known as the Scooby Doo ending.

There is a surprising amount of gore and violence for the time in these titles, which is what led to their inevitable downfall.  Some elements seeped into pulp hero titles like G-4 and the Spider.

The biggest Weird Menace titles were Dime Mystery, Terror Tales, Horror Tales, and Thrilling Mystery.  Other smaller titles include Strange Tales, Uncanny Tales, Mystery Novels, and Marvel Tales.  There was a brief revival in the 1960s with Web Terror Stories and Shock Mystery.

As with other pulps, the Weird Menace writers wrote in several genres under several different names.  For some reason, my favorite tales were written by writers better known for science fiction.  Authors include: Henry Kuttner, John H. Knox, Arthur Leo Zagat, Hugh Cave, Nat Schachner, Arthur J. Burks, Wyatt Blassingame, Novell Page, Emile Tepperman, Russell Gray, HM Appel and Robert E Howard

Author collections are available at Ramblehouse.  These are excellent collections, though it requires ordering via paypal.

Radioarchives.com also has several ebook collections, including single titles, available on their website and Amazon.com.  There are a few at Altus Press.

Other places to look include Pulpgen, Munseys, Mobileread, Gutenberg Australia, and Archive.org

Post-Apocalyptic Men's Adventure

In the 1980s, Men's Adventure fiction began to move away from vigilantism and crime and towards militarism and anti-terrorism.  Another direction it took was towards post-apocalyptic and survivalist fiction.  Post-apocalyptic fiction is a much broader category, but within that umbrella there were several series of Men's Adventure paperbacks that were oriented more towards action than science fiction.

Many, such as The Survivalist and Ashes, start before the apocalypse, while others like Deathlands and Doomsday Warrior are set in a future wasteland.  Many are Road Warrior knock offs.  Cold War paranoia is in full bloom here, and the Russians often remain the enemy.

Some recurring themes:

Blaming liberals:  America was destroyed because liberals were too cowardly to preemptively murder the entire eastern hemisphere.

Showing up the exes:  So, you left me because I spent the kids' college fund on dried MREs and boxes of gold I buried in the woods?  Now who wants in my nuclear bunker, huh?

Rape Gangs:  The mushroom clouds are still hovering in the air when the survivors divide themselves into competing themed rape gangs.  Food and clean water can come later.

My more or less exhaustive list.  Of these, Deathlands and Endworld have survived as of 2014.

• Ashes by William J Johnstone
• Blade by David Robbins
• CADS by John Sievert
• Deathlands by James Axler
• Doomsday Warrior by Ryder Stacy
• Eagleheart by CT Westcott
• Endworld by David Robbins
• Freeway Warrior by Joe Dever
• The Guardians by Richard Austin
• Last Ranger by Craig Sargent
• Last Rangers by Jake Davis
• The Marauders by Michael McGann
• Mutants Amok by Mark Grant
• Outrider by Richard Harding
• Phoenix by David Alexander
• Roadblaster by Paul Hofrichter
• Steele by JD Masters
• The Survivalist by Jerry Ahern
• Swampmaster by Jake Spencer
• Traveler by DB Drumm
• Warlord by Jason Frost
• Wingman by Mark Maloney
• The Zone by James Rouch

More, in broader strokes, at http://www.apocalypsebooks.com/

Piccadilly Cowboys

The Picadilly Cowboys were a group of British writers who gathered in a pub in Picadilly in London and wrote a series of violent, brutal western paperbacks in the 1970s and 80s.  Writing under various house names, they were Terry Harknett, Laurence James, Mike Linaker, Angus Wells, Ken Bulmer, John Harvey and Fred Nolan.

Much like the serial vigilante genre is a collection of copies, knock offs, and permutations of Don Pendleton's Executioner series, the Picadilly Cowboy genre spun off of the successful Edge series by George Gilman (Terry Harknett).

These ran parallel to other Men's Adventure paperbacks of the era, and had the same feel.  They drew their tone from the spaghetti western films, only much more brutal.  The protagonists were not anti-heroes, or amoral drifters with their own personal code.  They were at their kindest violent bullies, and at their worst outright villains.

The plots were incredibly cliche, but the stories stood out for the massive amounts of gore and violence, which puts most horror novels to shame.  It was obvious the writers were having a lot of fun with it, and were likely trying to outdo each other.  It wasn't unusual for a single gunshot wound to be described over the course of a full page.

Titles are easy to get in used bookstores, though it can be difficult to wade through the Western section to find these gems.  Many have been recently reprinted in cheap ebook editions by Piccadilly Publishing.

Here are the series titles with their credited author name.  There may be a couple of yanks mixed in here that share the same vibe.

• Edge by George G Gilman
• Steele by George G Gilman
• Angel by Frederick H Christian
• Apache by William M. James
• Breed by James A. Muir
• Bodie by Neil Hunter
• Caleb Thorn by LJ Coburn
• Claw by Mathew Kirk
• Crow by James W Marvin
• Cutter by Duff McCoy
• Gringos by JD Sandon
• Gunslinger by Charles C Garrett
• Hart by John B Harvey
• Hawk by William S Brady
• Herne the Hunter by John McLaglen
• Jubal Cade by Charles R Pike
• Lawmen by JB Dancer
• Peacemaker by William S Brady
• Six-Gun Samurai by Patrick Lee
• Undertaker by George G Gilman

More at Vault of Evil.