Pulp Apocalypse

In 2020, I was honored to have Justin Marriott, one of my inspirations for creating Paperback Warrior, invite me to write a Foreword for his one-off book Pulp Apocalypse. The testament is roughly a 100-page volume of post-apocalyptic fiction featuring reviews, articles, and loads of black-and-white paperback and magazine covers spruced up with some comic covers and interior art. I wanted to share my write-up with the PW fans and readers that didn't have an opportunity to buy the book. 

“Foreword”

I was about 10-years old when the world ended. I was sitting cross-legged on shag carpet in a double-wide trailer in rural Virginia. It was 1986 and my teenage cousins had scored a VCR over Christmas. They had rented two VHS movies, Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Mad Max (1979). While both films offered contrasting visions of doomsday, the end result was still the same – a violent fight for survival among the decimated and decayed ruins of our civilization. 

As a child of the 80s, the idea that the Soviets were bringing death to our doorsteps was ingrained in our daily American lives. The idea of a nuked-out or plagued America was saturated in popular culture, from cartoons like Thundarr the Barbarian (1980) to books like Stephen King's The Stand (1978) and Robert R. McCammon's Swan Song (1987). Fully embracing the phenomena, it was interesting to see the 1980s nuclear hysteria transform into zombie popuarity. 

Arguably, America's recent pop-culture fascination with zombies could be attributed to three things: Image Comics' The Walking Dead (2003), Brian Keene's novel The Rising (2003), and the popular movie 28 Days Later (2002). All three of those works, crossing three different mediums, have somewhat peculiar plot-lines – man's will to survive in a post-apocalyptic graveyard of undead or infected. Essentially, these works reimagined George Romero's iconic Night of the Living Dead (1968) into a new phenomenon by bringing the apocalypse into our modern world. Movies, books, comics, and even TV shows became saturated in these apocalyptic visions of the walking dead, forming the ultimate man versus nature contest in an extreme Darwinian state – survival of the fittest. 

Pulp Apocalypse is a celebration of doomsday. Thankfully, a fictitious one where we can all escape modern reality, exchanging it for a deformed tomorrow of post-doomsday, action-adventure storytelling. I am honored to join Justin Marriott on this journey as Paperback Warrior's post-apocalyptic fiction correspondent to celebrate the freakishly good, the abysmally bad, and well....Roadblaster. 

Enjoy!

Eric Compton
Paperback Warrior

Get Pulp Apocalypse HERE.