Reading Rumble TV Title Match

It's Salvatore vs Salvatore, as two tie-in Titans face off for the Television Title

Reading Rumble Opener

Thirty authors enter the ring, one by one. Each round every story I like stays in the ring. Any misfire and it's over the ropes.

After all thirty authors have entered things get more competitive. If all the stories in a round are good, the one I like the least gets eliminated.

Depending on performance, we could see from 30 to 59 rounds, and from 30 to over 900 stories. Buckle in, we're going for a ride.

Pre Show Match - Garbage Men vs Night Wind

Opening our event in non-title action, a Men's Adventure veteran faces off against a veteran of the Tokyo Dome. It's Garbage Men: Wresting in Shadows by Anthony Adams against Stephen Mertz' Night Wind.

Bloody Pile of Horror - World Title Match Results

 

I like Parker's style, but it challenges the limits of my patience at times. But the Night Hunter got complacent, and Parker sneaks up with a schoolboy, rolling him up for the pin. Donald E. Westlake is our new World Champion.

Bloody Pile of Horror - United States Title Match Results

 

Matt Helm's forces are routed, and Vietnam Ground Zero defends the belt from one more assault.

Bloody Pile of Horror: Intercontinental Title

Two interesting titles, one pro-corporate violence, one with anti-corporate violence. Interesting, but not enough to continue either series. The referee declares no contest, and the Intercontinental Title is vacated.

Bloody Pile of Horror - Intercontinental Title Match

 

Our inaugural champion Mike McQuay swaps titles, bringing the Book of Justice against challenger Jack Slade with Gatling.

Fantasy Tales vs Startling Detective - First Fall

At the End of the Road by Patrick Connolly
Fantasy Tales Vol 2 No 3 Summer 1978

A young woman and her subtextual predatory lesbian roommate leave the small town behind to broaden their horizons in London. She hooks up with the landlady's son who ends up being dead and the landlady's dead and that means everybody's dead, me, you, everyone died already.

The Phantom in the House of Oesterreich by Don Nachaidh
Startling Detective Adventures Vol 5 No 26, July 1930

This one's wild. Years after a rich man was murdered while his wife was locked in a closet, it's revealed that she had been keeping her young lover as a sex slave in the attic, slipping him food and publishing the pulp fiction he wrote by candlelight (I looked and couldn't find what he published). The lover killed the husband after the couple argued, then later faked amnesia and started a new life. The wife's multiple affairs eventually uncovered the plot, though neither were ever convicted. This was made into three films, including one with Neal Patrick Harris.

An absolute squash. One of the most intriguing true crime stories against... well let's just say this was Raven/Canyon on Villano IV all over again.

Chamber of Horrors Match

It's here! The Chamber of Horrors!

Two teams. Eight titles. One electric chair. Returning authors face off against new authors in a steel cage. In that steel cage, another steel cage. And in that cage - an electric chair.

The match ends when one teams straps a member of the other team in the chair and turns on the juice.

Returning authors include: Shaun Hutson, David Sodergren, Jory Sherman, and Donald Glut

New authors: William Meikle, Sidney Williams, Ray Garton, and Web Terror Tales

Brought to you by Donnie Goodman's debut horror collection The Razorblades in my Head, free on Kindle until 10/5 

Trash Fiction Championship: Bloody Pile of Horror

Trash Fiction Championship presents BLOODY PILE OF HORROR!

Eight horror authors, two teams, one electric chair, in...THE CHAMBER OF HORRORS!

Derrick Ferguson defends the Young Guns Title against newcomer Hunter Shea. Alien Nation faces off against the Forgotten Realms for the TV Title.

After no Crusierweight champion was crowned due to interference, Dennis Etchison, Joe Lansdale, Roald Dahl, and Ed Wood, Jr. will settle their differences in a four way grudge match.

Startling Detective Adventures will meet the challenge of Fantasy Tales in a four falls to a finish match. John Maddox Roberts faces Sigfridur Skaldaspillir for the European title. Mike McQuay shoots it up with Jack Slade for the Intercontinental Belt It's Helm vs Helm, as Eric Helm takes on Donald Hamilton for the US title. And Robert Faulcon defends the World Championship title against Richard Stark. 25+ Authors 7 Title Matches 1 ELECTRIC CHAIR

NRV: Cüneyt Arkin Memorial Tournament

 

No Redeeming Value - Our Main Event

 

The Series Showdown started way back in February, 2020. Eight tournaments, 64 book series, 112 novels. Alien Nation has already claimed the Television Title belt. Now the top seven book series compete for the four vacant titles - European, Intercontinental, United States, and World championships.

Let's meet our competitors:

Vietnam: Ground Zero by Eric Helm. War is Hell brutality an jungle adventure.

Night Hunter by Robert Faulcon: Like John Constantine in an Evil Dead story scripted by Nigel Kneale.

Renegade by Ramsay Thorne: Mercenary action in Central America against the geopolitical background preceding the digging of the Panama Canal, with butt sex.

Mathew Swain by Mike McQuay: A hardboiled detective in a cyberpunk future, before Blade Runner.

Falcon by Mark Ramsay: Revenge seeking former crusader leads a private army.

Imaro by Charles Saunders: Early Sword and Soul innovator, monsters and magic in a fictional Africa stand in.

Horn by Ben Sloane. The winner of the first Series Showdown tournament. Nihilistic cyberpunk Robocop cash in that shifted into buddy cop territory.

These seven authors will go head to head, and the top four in ranked order will be our inaugural Trash Fiction Champions

NRV: Cruiserweight Gauntlet Round 6

Not a fan of 50s whimsical fantasy or 70s conceptual stuff, it would appear. Henry Slesar and Adrian Cole are both counted out, and two new authors will run The Gauntlet!

NRV: Cruiserweight Title Gauntlet Round One

Roald Dahl's drab snobbery versus Robert Bloch's dull snootiness. Dahl barely makes it a couple pages through the Gauntlet before being eliminated, hopefully clearing a path for an author who wasn't a miserable anti-Semite. But it won't be Bloch, who also fails to measure up. We start with a double countout, and two new authors will meet in this game of human chess! Will one of them survive the Gauntlet?

No Redeeming Value: Cruiserweight Championship Gauntlet

Can one author defeat all challengers, survive eight rounds, and become Trash Fiction Championships first Cruiserweight Champion? Will Roald Dahl survive...The Gauntlet!?

Brought to you by comic writer Kek-W, author for 2000 AD among others.

Follow him on twitter @19f3_records

Buy his stuff at Amazon

Tag Team Elimination Tournament Final Round

Startling Detective Adventures (December 1937, v19n113)

Double Death: Trapping New Jersey's Elusive Cop Killer by Tom Bailey

Cops are shot while serving a warrant on an eccentric bail bondman.

Teen-Age Gangsters (1957)

Sex and Liquor

Stories of "non-virgin clubs", with games like seven minutes in heaven, pretty much the stuff of 80s teen comedies. Tame for this title.

Battered and bloodied, these two true crime titles barely stumbled through the last round, but Startling Detective Adventures makes the pin, and is your new Tag Team Champion!

NRV: Tag Team Elimination Tournament Round Six

Startling Detective Adventures (December 1937, v19n113)

Murder in the Model's Boudoir by Lawrence Flick Jr.

A good time girl with a black book filled with influential names is murdered. 

Savage Realms Monthly Volume 2 (February 2021)

Titan's Thirst by Alexander S. Karcher

Quick, poetic piece about a primitive man hunting a man-eating lion.

Teen-Age Gangsters (1957)

Teen-Agers in Jail

Teen-Age Gangsters crawls deeper in the gutter with sexual sadism in girls' juvenile detention.

Savage Realms succumbs to the shadows.

NRV: Tag Team Elimination Tournament Round Two

Soldier of Fortune (March 1985, v10n03)

From Wailing Wall to Hallowed Ground by Jim Graves

Learned a lot about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial - I didn't realize there were objections at the time to the bleakness of the Memorial Wall, as well as to the architect Maya Yin Ling for being born in Ohio. I tease, it was from racism, with Ross Perot calling her an "egg roll". They added a statute and a flagpole as part of a compromise, and it's questionable how much of the controversy was from veterans as a whole as opposed to some financial backers. This article is about the inauguration of the Three Soldiers statue.

Complete Man (February, 1967, v7n01)

Vietnam's Life-or-Death Rescue Daredevils by Emile C. Schurmacher

Quick handful of pages on helicopter rescues, evacuating wounded from fire zones.

Teen-Age Gangsters (1957)

Thrill Pills

Straight talk about goofballs. As silly as the parodies are, 1950s drug warnings are way sillier. Teens using barbiturates constantly get laid which somehow leads to car theft.

Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine (March 1983, v28n03)

Professor Kreller's Secret by Ingram Meyer

A romance author hires a pair of private detectives, one a grandma, to investigate her professor neighbor, who has guest visit but never leave. The professor drops dead on campus, they find newspaper clippings that the visitors are criminals who escaped justice, and they think the professor turned them into cats. This is introduced as a second act red herring, but the story just kinda ends with a "maybe he did turn them into cats...somehow". Feels like it was written for children.

Street & Smith's Mystery Magazine (May 1940,v06n01)

Too Many Ghosts by Maxwell Grant

Norgil the Magician investigates a murder in a haunted theater. Usual convoluted Scooby-Doo stuff.

Startling Detective Adventures (December 1937, v19n113)

Milwaukee's Passion Slayers and the Missing Schoolgirl

Two drifters rape and kill a teenage girl. Interesting to see some basic profiling, which was probably as effective as it is now. After conviction, the judge gives a speech about sterilization, which I'm sure has nothing to do with the culprits being Eastern European.

Savage Realms Monthly Volume 1 (January 2021)

The Festival of the Bull by Steve Dilks

Bohun, a warrior from an Africa stand-in, escapes a slave ship and lands in a Greco-Roman stand in, where he his captured, forced to fight a jaguar, and escapes. Solid enough, but after reading 70s historical fiction the recent stuff feels a bit PG-13 to me.

A couple of snoozers in this round, but Professor Kreller's Secret is giving me second thoughts about the entire shelf of AHMMs I've collected. Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine is eliminated.

NRV: Tag Team Title Elimination Tournament

Announcing an eight title elimination tournament. A story or feature from each title will compete, with the lowest reviewed title will be eliminated until we crown our first Tag Team Champions.

Brought to you by John Bender's Chainsaw.

"In Chainsaw, Bender delivers a rollercoaster ride of redneck humor and blood-soaked visuals that dives deep into backwoods hilarity while going full-tilt duh in all the right spots. More fun than pass the cousin at a hillbilly reunion, Bender pulls out all the stops and pushes the envelope on toilet jokes, dirt road mentalities, and gory splashes of ineptitude."

Available from Amazon

Four titles were chosen by the commissioner and another four were picked randomly from the Trash Menace collection. In publication order:

Representing True Crime, Startling Detective Adventures

The pulps continue with Street & Smith Mystery Magazine

True Crime goes juvi with Teen-Age Gangsters

Complete Man gets things sweaty

Long time veteran Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine fights for it's spot. Still in print and available from Amazon.

Soldier of Fortune takes the occasional break from firearm accessory ads for features

And representing Fantasy we have a couple of Young Guns, Grimdark Magazine, available from Amazon.

And Savage Realms, also at Amazon

Six decades, eight titles, 35 stories, but only one magazine will bring home the belt as our inaugural Tag Team Champion.

No Redeeming Value

 

Winner of an eight magazine elimination tournament will decide the Tag Team Champion.

Alien Nation will defend the TV title against Marvel.

Roald Dahl will run the gauntlet - last author standing becomes the Cruiserweight Champion.

A Fatal Four Way match to decide the Young Guns Champion.

Our first Series Showdown Champion Horn will face off against the six other genre series champions  - the top four will be our new European, Intercontinental, United States, and World Champions.