I love pulp fiction. I love reading it, reading about it and I especially love books collecting it. After all, I came to sapphic literature through Radclyffe Hall (by way of Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness), and Mabel Maney. In fact, I originally began visiting the Lesbrary after coming across Danika’s writing on lesbian pulp fiction and its emergent canon.
Offbeat, unhinged, campy, tacky, escapist, hilarious and often unabashedly, shamelessly sordid even as many plumbed maudlin depths for emotional truths, pulp fiction has held its place in lesbian literary history for the better part of the previous century. Now, The New Lesbian Pulp is the brash new girl on the block, one who knows and loves her history but is informed rather than intimidated/limited by it. Tying together uncovered and rediscovered works by older writers with more recent short fiction, this collection is a great gateway into a genre rife with history. Bringing together the high and the low, the suited and the skirted, the high-heeled and the sneakered; the raucous, humorous, profane and melancholic in turn and all tangled together spill from these pages.
Yet all the thrills and the taboos collected here are shot through with a lot of heart. Stock stereotypes that will be familiar to anyone raised on 90s tabloid culture are reinvigorated with intention, populating richly (or at the very least very entertainingly) irreverent narratives with jilted lovers plotting gory, grasping revenges (Anna Dorn’s “Palm Desert”, Lillian James’s “Smoke and the Sea Breeze”), tortured butches trying to find love—or at least an affirming lay (Nadine Santoro’s “Jouissance”, M.J. Corey’s “Rebound”), and lonely women who go about with their screams silenced and sublimated into melancholic awareness (Lorraine Hansberry’s “Chanson du Konallis”, Shamim Sarif’s “Notes in a Minor Key”). There’s also your standard assortment of femme fatales, homicidal housewives and errant employees led astray by wicked promises—all deftly subverted and configured by queer desire.
Of course, it would be remiss to suggest that pulp fiction past or present was a paragon of irreproachable morality and comforting sanctuary. The New Lesbian Pulp’s editors don’t shy away from the genre’s roots in the salacious, the shocking and the often macabre. The blood-guts-and-bodybags retribution in Rose Jeanou’s “Revenge of the Roadkill Bodysnatchers” borders on splatterpunk with its gleeful descriptions of effluvia. The uncensored text of Ella Boreau’s “Cottonmouth” is full of rank eroticism centered on, as the characters themselves put it, “kissing cousins”. And approaching the alienated old-school serial dread of Lovecraft and Poe is Octavia C. Saenz’s story about the desecration of a dead occultist’s bedroom during a sex party—one that features LED lights and the sort of pastiche paganism that will be all too familiar to many modern readers.
Over 300-odd pages, pulp fiction’s illicit thrills are pulled into the 21st century kicking and bleeding, with an accompanying diversity of body types and background characterization*. Needless to say, I’ve been bringing up the collection every time someone asks for messier, self-avowedly bad-representation sapphic fiction that might explain but has absolutely no interest in making excuses for its characters’ debauchery. There is no redemption arc to be found here. Only the raw vulnerability of women on the edge, eking out pleasure from pain, from grief, from uncertainty.
Relatable feelings, even if the lengths they go to aren’t.
In Ahmed’s “The Promise of Happiness”, she considers how material precarity and the lack of a legal infrastructure for securing material inheritances was woven into the 20th centuries’ queer melancholies and desires. She and her peers recognize that much of the importance of material inheritances comes from the security they offer, the histories they make tangible for passing on. The ability to hold something that reinforces your connection to a person, to their your life together with them and what held enough shared importance to hold onto. To build the future with.
In this current moment, with its own legal and social precarities, its own impulses towards reactionary ideals and financial straitjacketing in the name of moral order, pulp fiction’s censorial circumventions and willingness to imagine fevered futures outside happiness or happily ever afters remains an inheritance I am only too happy to indulge in. Might not be for everyone, but anyone looking for a collection of sensually charged stories that marry bloody, ribald sensationalism with a keen ear for language will find pleasure between these pages.
Content warnings: sexual content, violence, intimate partner violence, murder, physical assault, sexual assault, incest
*Just look at that cover. Considering the paucity of women of color in much of the now-canonized lesbian pulps, it’s notable that the entangled bodies on the cover of this collection are visibly, incontrovertibly more melanated than those gracing most old mass-market paperbacks. As Bendix writes in her introduction, this collection also “introduces trans femmes and butch-on-butch dynamics to the otherwise butch-femme, femme-femme interactions” that, unfortunately, remain more widely accepted in media.
