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Welcome to Virtual Pulp press! To browse by genre, use the navigation menu on the left. Each category is broken down into book, e-book and movie pages. Stop by frequently to check for new products, share a thought or question on the forum, enjoy some cool, free videos, or articles such as those on the blog page.
(Opinions expressed in articles posted on the site don't neccesarily reflect those held by Virtual Pulp Press.)
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MEN'S FICTION AUTHOR FROM THE '80S GOING EBOOK!
By Hank Brown
My introduction to men's adventure novels, and war fiction, was The Sergeant #4:The Liberation of Paris by Gordon Davis. Up until I cracked open that paperback, I had never read anything like it before. I turned pages in a stunned trance, eyeballs dilated, jaw slack, visions of bayonet duels dancing in my head.
With this new literary universe to explore, I began collecting similar books. (It took me years, but I now have the entire Sergeant series in paperback.) Another series I collected was The Ratbastards by John Mackie. It was also a WWII series, but set in the Pacific rather than Europe.
At the time, I took the different author names at face value, but couldn't help noticing similarities in style, phrases in the dialog, and certain recurring sequences in different battle scenes.
The main protagonist in both series is a big, tough, battle-scarred Master Sergeant in the infantry--Clarence J. Mahoney in The Sergeant and John Butsko in The Ratbastards. Both have loyal junior NCO sidekicks that were once innocent all-American boys, but are now the best soldiers in any man's army.
In The Sergeant, the narrative usually focuses on Mahoney and Corporal Cranepool, as they are often sent on special missions by themselves. But sometimes they stay with their line platoon in the 88th "Hammerhead" division, and one other recurring character from their platoon bears mentioning: Private Butsko. He is not like MSgt Butsko over in the Pacific, but more like one of Butsko's men, Frankie LaBarbara--a trash-talking goldbrick who is always looking for ways to take personal advantage of the circumstances in war.
In The Ratbastards Butsko and Corporal Bannon are a fixture, but other members of the 23rd Infantry's Recon Platoon get plenty of attention, including ladies' man Frankie LaBarbara. My favorite was probably prolific point man Sam Longtree, an Apache from Arizona who is the ideal soldier-scout. Where he conforms to the Redskin Stereotype, it is only because he knows that's what white folks expect of him and he's too careful to make trouble for himself. Nutsy Gafooley is a former hobo. Homer Gladly is a huge corn-fed country boy with tremendous physical strength. Then there's Regimental Commander Colonel Stockton, who has a special place in his heart for his incorrigible ratbastards.
In both series, the POV regularly jumps around...not just between the GI characters but between Axis and Allies, and between the respective high commands, to division, regiment, battalion and company commanders, to the grunts on the line.
In any given volume from one of these series, it's normal to see a firefight break down into an up-close rumble, and for more bayonet combat to take place than happened in the entire war. Maybe even more than took place in WWI. It's also normal to have at least one explicit sexual episode, featuring details just as graphic as the stomachs ripped open and limbs blown off during the battle segments.
I enjoyed The Sergeant a bit more than The Ratbastards--perhaps because the campaign in Europe was more linear than in the Pacific, with a geography familiar from history and National Lampoon's European Vacation. In MacArthur's island-hopping campaign on the other side of the world, men bled and died in obscure patches of jungle surrounding military airstrips with no Eiffel Tower or Parthenon in sight and nothing to distinguish the ground taken or lost from any other patch of jungle.
Maybe I also enjoyed the Davis titles better than the Mackies because Mahoney was more over-the-top than Butsko. He's not a guy I would like in real life but he sure is fun to read about. Butsko is rough around the edges, but I might could share a drink with him in a civilian context without feeling icky.
For whatever reason, though, the Mackie series was longer-lived than the Davis one, and those I've met who read both have the opposite preference I do.
I could go on with the comparisons, but now that we are in the Information Age it has been made public that John Mackie and Gordon Davis were both pseudonyms of author Len Levinson--a guy I'd definitely want to share a drink with and chat about his books.
Somehow (probably plain old moxie and business acumen) Levinson managed to either retain or win back the rights to some (or hopefully all) of his fiction. And that means his fiction is being digitized and re-released in ebook form! That means I can collect the Ratbastards titles I don't have in paperback and eventually read the entire series. It means the uninitiated, with e-readers, can now easily discover his pulpy action extravaganzas for themselves, download them for a paltry sum and read the entire series in sequence if they so desire.
The e-books are being published under Levinson's actual name. He has some westerns out, and hopefully will digitize the entire Gordon Davis series before all is said and done, too. It goes without saying that we will be adding his e-books to our cyber-shelves here at Virtual Pulp Press. Enjoy!
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Nook Books are coming to Virtual Pulp Press!
As difficult as it is for Kindle owners/Amazon shoppers to wade through all the romances, chick-lit and other stuff to find the sort of books collected here at Virtual Pulp Press, for Nook owners it's even more difficult. B&N's search engine seems to have improved a bit over the last couple years (you don't have to type in the very last letter of the title or author's name to get a suggestion anymore, for instance). But you want to browse by genre on Barnes&Noble.com? Forget it.
Well, VPP is coming to your rescue, Nook owners. Starting with paramilitary fiction, we are building pages for you. It may take some time to get all of them up because the process is a bit more involved than with the Kindle titles, but your day is coming.
For those who like audiobooks, we will be amping up on those as well. VPP is getting better every day.
