“Where the Pulp Monkeys Live”

Bill Crider has been warning us for months about this, and now it’s finally happened: the debut edition of Astonishing Adventures! is finally available. I admit, it took me frustratingly long to figure out exactly how to download this issue (in PDF format) via the Media Fire free Web hosting site, but my patience was ultimately rewarded.

Editor-in-chief John Donald Carlucci and his staff have assembled a quite handsome publication, must nicer-looking than most Internet ’zines, with a distressed cover that immediately reminds one of AA’s pulp-fiction intentions. I haven’t yet had the opportunity to read through all of the contents, but among them are short stories by Kristopher D. Madden, Timothy D. Gallagher, and Lloyd Hudson Frye (who contributes the splendidly titled tale, “He Married a Yeti”); interviews with novelist Joe R. Lansdale (Lost Echoes) and “legendary comics artist Michael Wm. Kaluta”; and editorial ruminations about the 1994 film The Shadow, “Dames, Dolls, and Femmes Fatale: The Women of Pulp Fiction,” and Steve McQueen’s sadly abbreviated movie career.

This is an ambitious start for a fiction Webzine. Let’s hope that Carlucci & Co. can continue to maintain such high standards. Go here to see Astonishing Adventures! for yourself. In the left-hand column, click on “Download Archive: Issue 1.”