"over-the-top historical mystery adventure"
During the Great Depression, the most popular fiction was
found in pulp magazines with names like ASTOUNDING STORIES,
WEIRD TALES, and DIME MYSTERY. The two bestsellers of that
period were DOC SAVAGE and THE SHADOW where evil villains
abounded, spunky damsels were rescued, and plots to take
over the world or destroy a portion of it were the primary
subject matter. The Indiana Jones movies are a good
comparison to the over-the-top adventure elements of these
stories.
Lester Dent (DOC SAVAGE) and Walter Gibson (THE SHADOW) are
the top-selling authors in this world of pulp, and they are
adversaries as well as enemies. Their chance encounter at
a local tavern, a story about a locked room New York
Chinatown murder, and the death of horror writer H. P.
Lovecraft sets each on the track of a story that proves to
be more like their pulp adventure stories than they could
ever believe. Their paths finally meet, and they must stop
a horrific crime that will leave thousands of innocent
people dead.
The plot is quite slow and convoluted early on, and a third
plot line about a Chinese warlord named Zhang Mei is woven
through until it joins the path of these two men and the
band of companions they've picked up along the way, but the
patient reader will gradually see how all the strands lead
to the conclusion, and an Indiana Jones style finale of
showdowns and breathtaking escapes will more than pay back
that patience.
Marilynn Byerly, author Copyright © 2006
Reviewed by PNR Group Member
Posted December 17, 2006
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The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is a thrilling debut
novel that casts the rivalry between two of pulp fiction's
most revered writers into its own saga, which bursts from
the pages with blood, cruelty, fear, mystery, vengeance,
courageous heroes, evil villains, dames in distress, secret
identities, disguises, global schemes, hideous deaths,
beautiful psychics, superweapons, cliff-hanging escapes, and
other outrageous pulp lies that are all completely
true. Return to 1937, when America is turning to the
pulps for relief from the Depression, and meet Walter
Gibson, the mind behind The Shadow, and his rival for
the top-selling spot on the nation's newsstands, Lester
Dent, creator of Doc Savage. The murder of Gibson's
friend H. P. Lovecraft -- victim of a mysterious death that
literally makes the skin crawl -- is about to bring these
two writers face to face with a peril sprung from the
pulps. The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is at
once a valentine to an old-fashioned genre as well as a
modern, meta-literary examination of the classic hero pulp.
From the palaces and battlefields of warlord-plagued China
to the seedy waterfronts of Providence, Rhode Island; from
frozen seas and cursed islands to the dizzying and
labyrinthine alleys and tunnels of lower Manhattan, Dent and
Gibson, joined by the young pulp writer L. Ron Hubbard and a
host of colorful characters, finally step out from behind
the shadows of their creations to take part in a heroic
journey far greater than any story they have imagined as
they race to stop a madman destined to create a new empire
born of, and based in, pure, gaseous evil. The
Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is a swashbuckling romantic
tale of writers and writing, magic and love, marriage and
fatherhood, and ambition and loss that weaves the true lives
of its real-life characters into a fictional epic.
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