Big Pimpin' With Cüneyt Arkın

The Man Who Returned by Edmond Hamilton

Edgar Allan Poe too cheery for you?  Here's a more depressing take on the premature burial theme.

Bonegrinder by John Lutz

Bonegrinder
by John Lutz
1977 Putnam

Screw this book.  Even with the modern blurb it sells itself as a gory monster story.  It isn't.  It isn't horror.  It has elements of mystery and suspense, but not even really that.  It had a general vibe of rural-noir, but Blood Simple this ain't.  The author is better known for detective novels, where I would guess he would be more suited.

There are a series of killings attributed to an ill-defined lake creature that seems to be half sea monster, half bigfoot.  The local sheriff, a guilt-stricken widower who drinks too much, frets over monster chasers and tourists without really doing anything.  The mayor loves the publicity and a local eccentric has put out a reward.

We've got lengthy subplots about a photographer and his wife, a soon-to-be-divorced couple on their last vacation, and a journalist/folklorist who works for some kind of X-Files type federal department.

I'm just going to go ahead and spoil the heck out of this...

Supermen and Hard Luck

At the risk of turning into a Quentin Tarantino monologue, there are Marvel people, and there are DC people.

The distinction wasn't so great in later years, but it was especially pronounced in the Golden and Silver Ages.  DC was full of flawless, perfect, all-powerful, literal Supermen.  A good chunk of the Marvel roster didn't even have superpowers.  DC villains had to work extra hard to try to outwit the heroes, only to be overpowered.  Marvel heroes lost half their battles and had to use their brains to supplement their powers.

Case in point - Showcase #4, the first issue of the Silver Age Flash.  His first foe is the Turtle Man, the slowest man on earth.  His only super power is his deliberateness, which didn't serve him well against the guy that can run around the globe, through objects, go back in time, and do pretty much whatever he wants by vibrating molecules.

Even through recent decades, I find myself rooting for the bad guys in DC comics.  I like the underdog, and after a while Superman and Batman just come across as bullies beating up villains far weaker than them.

There are also a couple different kinds of plot styles.  Spider-Man cannot catch a break.  Far from being an adolescent power fantasy, he loses to the villain in the first half of the comic, beats them but fails to keep them from escaping in the second half, can't get the girl, has to put up with bullies, and barely manages to make enough money to cover his web formula.

In other stories, everything goes the hero's way.  Early Luke Cage comics were like this.  Seemed like every issue had him chained up in some kind of deathtrap.  How can he possibly escape?  By flexing his chest muscles really hard, it turns out.  Not much of a challenge.

We see the same trends in pulp heroes.  Before I actually read it, I was turned off by Doc Savage.  He's the Mary Poppins of pulp heroes - practically perfect in every way.  Every issue introduces something new that he's the world's best at.  However, the stories work because, despite being a god among men, everything goes wrong for him.  As Lester Dent put it, he kept shoveling grief on Savage, to the point that it challenges him and offers some suspense to the reader.

The Spider has even more problems.  Despite being called a Master of Men, his skills are nowhere near as refined as Savage, but his luck is even harder.  Nothing works out for him.  He'll spend half a chapter developing a ruse that his enemy immediately sees through.  Some books spend half the page length having him getting caught by the cops and his failing to talk his way out of it over and over again.  The Spider only succeeds out of the tenacity and grit of being a stone-cold psychopath.

Moving forward in time, a lot of the Men's Adventure heroes weren't especially remarkable, and they succeeded just from the plot moving forward the way they wanted.  Mack Bolan is skillful, but he's not the world's best at anything.  He triumphs largely because everything goes his way.  The enemy falls for every ruse and every plan comes together better than expected.  This works better in the Don Pendleton stories.  Bolan considers himself a dead man, and his dgaf attitude lets him take daring chances that pay off.

Many of the later Men's Adventure titles suffer as they start going more DC - swarmy heroes that are the best at everything and have everything go their way.

Discoverability Myths and Keywords in Titles

tldr version: putting keywords in the title increases discoverability, discoverability doesn't appreciably drive sales, and algorithms are weird.

Back in the days before Yelp and the internet, if you needed a plumber you opened the phone book and called the one with the biggest ad or the one listed first.  This is why so many plumbers were called things like "AAAAAAAAAuger Plumbing".

Indie authors do the same thing today with regard to keywords.  You're allowed 7 keywords, but in practice it's really as many as you can fit with 400 characters.  Using these 400 characters to accurately describe elements of a book is generally acceptable.  Using them to stuff as many popular keywords that have nothing to do with your book - "Romance Coming of Age Clean Menage James Patterson Shifter Horror Cozy Mystery Erotica Fantasy" - not so good.

And if you put the keywords in the freaking title and subtitle, there is a special place in hell reserved for you.  The title is supposed to be what the book is called - what is on the actual cover.

"Hey, I read a great book last weekend."
"Really, what's it called?"
"THRILLER: MYSTERY The Sassafras Conundrum (THRILLER MYSTERY THRILLER THRILLER)"

That kind of thing.  It's against Amazon policy, and authors occasionally get an email telling them to change it.  There's a reason that people do that, and I tried to figure out if it works.

The idea is to improve discoverability.  For my example I used the keyword Horror.  There are 163,999 Kindle titles on Amazon related to horror, and just like poor Zany Zach's Plumbing, most of these folks are going to be buried deep deep down at the bottom.

Search Results	Sales Rank	Sales	Keywords in Title
1	35011	12	y
2	5312	6	y
3	51099	13	y
4	72639	14	y
5	859	3	n
6	8261	8	n
7	213499	17	y
8	187314	16	y
9	10614	11	n
10	5722	7	y
11	183690	15	y
12	9749	10	n
13	538,306	19	n
14	771	2	n
15	649	1	n
16	no sales	20	y
17	9385	9	n
18	381442	18	y
19	2150	5	n
20	909	4	n

Search Results: Rank of non-free titles in the order they appear using a keyword search sorted by relevance.

Sales Rank: Overall sales rank at Amazon, the lower the better.

Sales: In order of Sales Rank out of this list

Keywords in Title: Y means there is a keyword that isn't a part of the actual title, like "Horror: The Waffle House Massacre (Horror, Thriller, Romance)".  N means there isn't.  Something like "The Scarening: A Novel of Unrelenting Horror" or "Horror Tales for Tweens" gets an N as well, since it's organically part of the title or subtitle.

First a word about relevance searches.  The algorithm used is secret and probably a little messed up on purpose so folks can't reverse engineer it.  In theory this should show the most relevant, i.e. the most horror-y, results first, then sorted by popularity.  It actually works pretty well, as the shifter erotica doesn't show up for several pages.

Things change if you change the sorting preferences.  One would assume changing to "sort by price" would then by subsorted by relevance - in other words, the order of all the free books would stay the same between searches.  This is not the case - sort by price and all the dreck gets mixed back in.  I suspect it sorts by price, then popularity.

Back to our chart.  The first 20 books I picked happened to have 10 titles with keywords in the title and 10 without.  I noticed looking past 20 books that keywords got fewer and fewer.

Interestingly, only one title in the first 20 search results was in the top 20 paid bestsellers for horror.  This is 15 in our list, which was the 18th horror bestseller.  Another thing to keep in mind - Amazon has been accused of purposely pushing down titles from publishers that they're in a slap fight with.

Titles with keywords did much better in discoverability, taking 8 of the top 10 spots.  For sales, they did worse, taking only 2 of the top 10 spots.  Looking at overall Amazon rank, they did much worse.  Books without keywords had an average rank of 58165.  The book with no sales would rank over 2 million, so using that number, books with keywords had an average rank of 313,573.

Both sets had outliers, so if you take out the worst selling book of each, the difference is even more telling: 4816 without keywords, 126,192 without.

This tells us a few things.  Keywords in titles improve discoverability.  A low selling book gets displayed ahead of better selling books.  I'm going to zoom in on our worst selling book.  As of this writing it has not sold a single copy.  There are 16 keywords in the title, many of them duplicates.  The actual title has three words and "scream" is misspelled.  If you do a search for "horror", this book appears three pages before Stephen King.  Pretty awesome, right?

You missed the part where I said it had zero sales.

Now, an argument could be made that these books would sell even worse without keywords in the titles.  Maybe so, maybe not, though some couldn't sell much worse.  However, I think we can put to rest the myth that discoverability is the key to success.  There are several titles in the top 10 search results that maybe sell a title a month, while Stephen King is doing fine languishing on page 7.

Looking at it from the other direction, none of the top 100 paid horror titles start with a keyword.

Could the keywords in titles do more harm than good?  There's no way to tell from these numbers, but as a reader browsing through titles, I look at "HORROR SUSPENSE THRILLER" the same way I do "RESIDENT" on my mail.

Gagging Gialli

I haven't been able to find a massive cover gallery for Italian Gialli, but I've picked some up here and there.  Giallo means yellow, referring to the color of the cover of post-war mystery novels.  The term was later used to refer to Italian horror movies.  There's the usual damsel in distress and bondage themes, but there's another running theme I see here.

  

I'll let you make your own joke about loud Italian women.

Old Time Radio - Almost Human

Continuing a series of things you can get away with on radio that you couldn't anywhere else - yikes!  Robert Bloch wrote this one about a gangster, his moll, and an eight foot tall robot with the mind of a child.