We’ve been hard at work behind the scenes and it’s about to start paying off. Featured below are the three titles in the immediate offing, but rest assured, other great things are brewing.

First up, we’ve got The Meanest of Times, by who else? Your editor-in-chief, Matthew Louis. You say you want men’s fiction? The kind that was standard fare before female supercops and trigger warnings became standard fare? Well, prepare yourself for more than you bargained for.

The back cover copy goes something like this:

The Meanest of Times is slated for release November 17. You can

*preorder here.

*And/or you can read it for FREE in exchange for an honest review here.

*Or, if you want to do things informally, DM us and we’ll get you an ARC.

Thanks to those who have already read this novel and are currently checking it out.

Next up, we’ve got Vengeance Trail by the great Matt Phillips. Slated for release in February 2027. The back cover copy goes something like this:

Stay tuned for updates on Vengeance Trail and other new titles!

And finally, of course, we’ve got The Vigilante Crime & Pulp Anthology: Volume 2—Psycho Pulp. Slated for release December 1 and featuring two, count ’em two, Edgar Award Winners, and two, count ’em two, Lansdales. This volume teems with twisty tales about twisted people, and guess what? We dusted off the Ouija board and none other than Alfred Hitchcock himself will guide readers through the experience.

Stay tuned as we announce the final contributor list and give you the links to preorder and/or join our review team to get an early look.

Thanks for reading. Don’t forget to check out the books we already have available. And if you haven’t already, subscribe below to get updates like this and articles and podcasts on the lit world and the world at large.

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The highly talented and hardworking writer—and my friend—Frank Kidd graciously asked me to write a foreword to his brand new collection of weird war short stories, Weird War Files: Vol. 1

I’m sharing it here as both an edifying piece on the weird fiction genre itself and the highest recommendation of Frank’s collection. Enjoy both!

That Feeling When You See a Shadow in the Corner of Your Eye

A Foreword

Vodka combines well with almost anything. Hell, it even enhances most drinks. Amps it up a little. Orange juice is okay, but splash some vodka and it becomes a screwdriver. Weird fiction is the vodka of genres. It gives stories a kick. A great example is the first season of the cult HBO series True Detective. Show creator Nic Pizzolato took the familiar odd-couple police procedural and filtered it through tropes, themes, and motifs of cosmic horror. That’s why audiences continue to discover and enjoy the show today whereas very few remember Cold Case or NYPD Blue.

But what is weird fiction? If only the answer were as simple as it is for “what is vodka?” One of the most popular episodes of my podcast, Vigilante Crime & Pulp, attempted to at least broadly answer the question. I’ve done more reading on the subject since I recorded that episode a year ago, and an unhealthy level of thinking about it. My goal here is to both summarize the features of the genre and demonstrate how these selected stories by Frank Kidd are a perfect first taste for discerning readers.

Weird fiction, most broadly, is the intersection of horror, speculative, and dark fantasy. Moreover, it blends specific shades of each of those genres. It’s more existential dread and occult horror than psycho slashers or vampires. It’s trippy Twilight Zone speculative fiction and not spaceships and tasers. It’s a kind of dark fantasy that eschews dragons and ogres for sentient marionettes and liminal spaces. Are you seeing a pattern? Weird fiction lives at the margins of other more easily identifiable niches. Therefore, it’s tempting to define it by what it is not instead of crafting a checklist of necessary tropes. As United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said of illegally obscene content, “I know it when I see it.” As the kids say, it’s a vibe.

Uncanny. Put a gun to my head and force me to describe the weird fiction vibe in one word and that’s what I’ll stutter as I piss my pants. The uncanny are things that disturb our psyche specifically because they’re bizarre, occult, and difficult to define. Now that’s weird fiction itself. Our lives are loaded with such experiences of the uncanny. As a small child, my mother would bring my brother and I to play with our cousins at their home in the suburbs of Philadelphia. It always seemed sunny and bright. It was a big single-family house with a wraparound yard perfect for hide-and-seek. They had a sandbox and swing-set, too. Some of my best memories involve summer days playing there while my dad was at work.

But I also remember, in the dustier corners of my brain, the tiny childhood horrors at that house. The fuzz on my arms standing straight up as I stood under the weeping willow tree. It looked out of place among the neighboring pines. Its sickening canopy of shaggy leaves like an old witch’s hair, blocking out the sun and threatening to suffocate me. The ominous storm cellar door no one opened. It looked like the lid to a burial vault or an entrance to a dungeon. I had been inside that very basement several times and it never bothered me, but somehow from the backyard that steel storm cellar door itself unsettled my core. Worse, however seemingly impossible, what if the door led nowhere? What if it simply covered grass? A cruel trick by some twisted, intelligent being.

That’s the trip, man. Weird fiction takes us from the mundane world to the disturbingly askew, and it does so with terrifying cosmic implications. This is heady stuff, if we want it to be, yet somehow it’s still pulp. Existential dread and the menace of unstable reality is, in the end, the stuff of working-class entertainment. Now that’s weird. It’s downright uncanny in and of itself. Weird fiction is arguably the first commercial genre to drive the pulp fiction boom. From Weird Tales to Argosy, H.P. Lovecraft and his contemporaries sold their decidedly weird wares to millions of everyday Joes looking for shit to read after work. Before H.L. Mencken and company boosted the crime fiction market with the iconic pulp periodical Black Mask, readers feasted on weird stories for years.

Partially because modern genres hadn’t yet been strictly defined (and policed), and partly because writers had ample space within to work, weird fiction covered a lot of tangential genre ground. Lovecraft was the grandfather of cosmic horror—stories of the lone soul in an uncaring or downright malicious universe. Robert E. Howard blended adventure with dark corners of strange worlds with his Conan universe. Clark Ashton Smith was a darker proto-Tolkien, a dean of the dark fantasy neighborhood of weird fiction. William Hope Hodgson explored the depths of the vast oceans in his maritime tales.

Pulp magazines collapsed long ago, but weird fiction always stood. Despite the best efforts of genre feds to herd writers into narrow (and more easily marketed) genres, the weird continues and thrives, though you often have to look harder to find it.

Detroit native Thomas Ligotti is widely considered the modern master of weird fiction and the heir to the Lovecraft legacy. His stories exemplify the genre by evoking actual experienced dread in the reader. Ligotti himself is an admitted psychiatric mess. He’s known more widely for his nihilist and anti-natalist philosophy book The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, which infamously influenced the aforementioned True Detective. In fact, his work is practically quoted within the show without attribution. Mainstream genre god Stephen King occasionally dabbles in the weird. A prime example is The Mist. An ordinary world is disrupted by an amorphous threat greater than collective humanity. There’s no silver bullet to slay the beast, nor a tidy epilogue by an academic to explain the origins of the specific evil. We thought we were okay, but the enemy was always with us.

No evil is more ordinary, sadly, than war. It’s uncanny, too. Princes send paupers to foreign lands to die for remote causes. It’s fantasy football for kings, only the players die or return home to a fate worse than death. America is awash with combat veterans returning to no home at all. For the homeless and mentally ill veteran, nature itself becomes a looming cosmic monster. Dry, icy air turning the sidewalks into a freezer-burnt mattress. And the prince sleeps in plush peace, not only ignorant of the warrior but suffering amnesia of the reason for the conflict. Reasonable minds support some version of a Just War Doctrine, but war itself—war as human institution—may never be justified.

Frank Kidd is the gunslinging knight errant of the post-gatekeeper pulp fiction movement. His working man’s doggedness and studious reading gives him the versatility of Robert E. Howard and the moral center of Louis L’Amour. That’s the type of writer who’s apt to meet the diverse demands of weird fiction. And in this collection, Kidd overlays weird elements onto the absurd human condition of war. As deep and important as the themes of these stories are, the entertainment value of each firmly roots them in the pulp fiction tradition.

This collection drags the reader into the trenches. Sometimes literally, as in my favorite story “Trench Rats.” The tragic violence of war would be enough to captivate any reader, but Kidd expertly seasons his fictive stew with weird elements. In “Mother, Is That You?” we travel to a dystopian future where man’s own natural origin is used against him in battle. Rod Serling himself would have optioned this story before he could light his next smoke. The tale “Red Lenses” revisits the bloodbath of the Vietnam War with an occult object element, one of my favorite plot devices not only in weird fiction but in all supernatural fiction.

This collection is the perfect introduction to weird fiction because Frank Kidd relies on two pillars of the genre: pulp and genre-bending uncanniness. You’ve found a powerful scroll in the safe deposit box of a crumbling gilded age bank long abandoned. Unroll it. Dust it off. Try to close the book and continue life as the same man you were before. Good luck.

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In the recent podcast bonus episode ‘90s Grunge Almost Made Me A Pussy, I made the offhand comment—hell, all of my comments are offhand—that I suspected one reason for the sustained popularity of country music over the decades is its deployment of storytelling. The lyrics often narrate a coherent plot, and the instrumentals provide the necessary vibes to underscore the emotional weight of the white man’s hard luck confessional.

The more I thought about this observation, the more I realized a lot of these country music stories were, well, noir crime fiction. In fact, many of them are the bleakest and darkest of noir. Indeed, the great Jim Thompson himself may have spun some of these older 45s in a drunken stupor above his typewriter. Inspiration!

I immediately dove into Spotify and curated songs from my personal jukebox to find the most Jim Thompson of such noir songs. Admittedly, this is not a pure country playlist, as you’ll notice right away. It veers into folk and Americana and even an Irish tune.

The fun thing about making themed playlists is they’re impossible to nail down correctly. Many of you will suggest songs I should have included. And I can’t wait! Tell me in the comments which songs belong on the list. During a recent editorial call, the Vigilante Crime brain trust rattled off all manner of punk rock, rockabilly, and Irish rock tunes which might be right at home on this playlist. Suggest those too!

“You think I’m psycho, don’t you, mama?” croons Jack Kittel in the opening track (“Psycho”). Blaze Foley tells us over twangy fingerpicking of acoustic strings that “the skies are full of dirt and gray” and “the winos drink, the pimps sell ass” in “You’ll Get Yours Aplenty.” A noir playlist would be incomplete without The Man In Black. Johnny Cash offers a bit about the killer inside him in “Delia’s Gone” with:

“First time I shot her / I shot her in the side / hard to watch her suffer / But with the second shot she died”

This is but a taste of the nihilistic ethos of the playlist, which also includes tracks by Colter Wall, Hank Williams, and Townes Van Zandt. Guns N’ Roses makes an appearance with their transgressive acoustic track “I Used to Love Her.” And, alas, what anti-social, psychopathic soundtrack of violent expression would be complete without Helter Skelter high-achiever Charles Manson? The CIA spent a lot of time and money engineering his career, so it would be a waste not to include his malcontent make-out music in “Look at Your Game Girl.”

One self-imposed constraint when I made this list is I wanted it to be the length of an actual LP. Not too short, not too long. All of these tunes are songs already in my regular rotation, so please don’t share this with any mental health professionals… nor my ex-wife’s lawyers. Ex-wives’, actually. Fuck, I need to pick up a guitar and write my own little ditty.

Enjoy, comment, and share!

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Other books mentioned in this episode:

The Blackboard Jungle by Evan Hunter

Roots Down to Hell by Matthew Louis

The Wrong Man by Matthew Louis

Frenzy by Jonathan Craig - Not specifically mentioned, but this is the other junkie amateur sleuth novel I was referring to.

As promised in the episode, here is a picture of a street from my neighborhood.

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The contributor list, subject to expansion and adjustment as things are finalized, is currently as follows:

• Harley Carnell

• Eli Cranor

• Jacqueline Freimor

• F.T. Grant

• M. Pratt Hall

• Christina Hoag

• Scott T. Hutchison

• Joe R. Lansdale and Keith Lansdale

• Michael Penncavage

• Michael Wagner

• Patrick Whitehurst

Due to the high volume of submissions there is still some sorting to be done before the 100% final contributor list is announced. We had to pass on some great stuff because of overlap in subject matter or other factors, so don’t be discouraged if you don’t end up on that list.

We are hard at work and will have more updates soon!

“This is easily one of the most egregiously insulting pieces of trash that I’ve ever read… definitely the last book from author Matthew Louis that I will ever read.” - Erica on The Reading Wife Blog

Vigilante Crime & Pulp’s resident blue collar scholar and unhinged raconteur, Philip “Big Philly” Smith, sat down with on the Tortuga Media Podcast to discuss transgressive neo noir novel Roots Down to Hell by .

Listen to the full episode as soon as it premiers this Saturday, September 19th!

And, hey, there’s still time to binge read the book before you listen to the deep dive: BUY Roots Down to Hell NOW!

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We hugely appreciate all the effort and interest. We ultimately received well over 200 submissions, so the sorting and selection will take slightly longer than expected. We plan to announce the final contributor list by September 21. If your story is accepted, you will receive a message from us, of course.

We can tell you at this juncture that you will see the triumphant returns of Joe R. Lansdale and the brilliant Christina Hoag—and Edgar Award winner Eli Cranor just may make an appearance.

We’ve also been busy behind the scenes with other projects, so in addition to anthology updates, keep checking in to get upcoming novel announcements.

BUY THE BOOK: Queenpin by Megan Abbott

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I’ve written before about the evolution of the novel. Prior to the publishing industry’s wide adoption of developmental editing in the mid-20th century, every author was his own developmental editor, and the job of editors at publishing outfits was to make the most of the least un-edited submissions.

The result is that, in the old days, published writing was vastly more miss than hit, at least by modern standards. And even the enduring hits—such as the work of Dickens, Zola, Dreiser, Tolstoy, and practically all iconic novels that predate Maxwell Perkins’ developmental-editing revolution—are “sprawling,” which is to say, extremely fucking rambly...usually involving a “pre-novel,” i.e., a hundred or more pages of the author warming up to his subject.

The noir genre notably bucked this trend. James M. Cain and the Black Mask gang served up straight shots of luridness and trained themselves to strip out, as Elmore Leonard put it, the parts that readers tend to skip.

But it didn’t buck it entirely.

The 1939 noir novel Detour by Martin M. Goldsmith lives on primarily because it was turned into a seminal film noir of the same name. I saw the movie years ago, and what I mainly remember is a remarkably grim female vagabond who verbally abuses the protagonist, and is eventually (spoiler alert) put out of her misery via a phone cord mishap.

In fact, this character—Vera—is the best part of the novel. Maybe the feralest femme fatale in all of fiction. A developmental editor, if such existed at the obscure house that first published the book (The Macaulay Company), would have zeroed in on that, and prescribed a reordering of the plot with her in mind. In the published version she is a mid-point invention who exists primarily as a sort of demonic presence that leads the protagonist to his final hell.

Likewise, the novel’s main hook, or what should be the novel’s main hook, is strong. A hitchhiker assumes the identity of a well-off guy who picks him up and then dies, and said hitchhiker, while driving the dead guy’s car, then picks up the vagabond Vera, who as it turns out knew the dead guy, and hence knows what said hitchhiker is up to, and can now get down to some blackmailing. The movie, in point of fact, became a classic because it centered on this scenario, and on Vera.

But the novel. Holy crap. It has not become a classic for the opposite reason. What it is, essentially, is a copyedited first draft. As you read it you can feel Mr. Goldsmith improvising, moment by moment, blindly willing himself to his daily word-count goal. Approximately 50 percent of the novel has approximately zero relevance to its dramatic core, but features the girl the hitchhiker is hitchhiking to—one Sue Harvey, aspiring LA starlet, and practicing tramp.

What we are treated to for half the book is the random stream of consciousness of a prime specimen of genus bimbo, as she reflects on who she has put out for, who she ought to put out for, her spats with her roommate and fellow waitresses, and any and all other banalities that traipse across what passes for her mind. As we meet her we learn that dashing actor Raoul Kildare just quasi-raped her, and she quasi-liked it.

Oh, I struggled all right, told him I didn’t like him that much, that I hardly knew him, that I was in love with someone else, and anyway, pu-lease, I was not that kind of girl; I even slapped him once or twice, hard. But after saying “No!” about a dozen times, something happened, something that had never happened to me before. Although I still did not want him to have me, I found my “No!” getting just a trifle weaker; and then, curiously, all fight drained out of me and I gave up struggling entirely. In the end, I didn’t exactly give myself to him. He took me.

This sort of thing could be fine if it had eventual relevance to the hitchhiker/Vera situation, but there is no plot justification, or attempt at plot justification. It exists in the novel simply as a parallel, disembodied bimbo diary. Following the above passage we get several pages of Sue free-flowing about male/female differences; about how she’s pretty sure, but not entirely sure, she doesn’t love the guy who just got her drunk and violated her against her protestations on the first date; about her impatience with being taken to a drive-in for a post-rape sandwich; and about her final decision to get back at Raoul by telling him he wasn’t a good lover (he thought the rape went off smashingly)...a cruelty which subsequently causes Raoul to attempt suicide by jumping off the Hollywood sign...a display of sensitivity which leads Sue to believe she loves him after all, which she argues herself in and out of in various other pages-long streams of consciousness.

No, really, that happens. The book was written—and published—like that. The bimbo B-plot was doubtlessly green-lighted because it stirred in some sex and got the page-count up, but whatever editor green-lighted it was as far from Maxwell Perkins as Sue Harvey is from Marie Curie.

It should be said, though, that if we ignore the bimbo detour, Detour is a solid noir. The hitchhiker drama is, for the most part, classic first-person cynicism of the era, and when Vera finally enters the picture, that drama comes alive. We get pages of snappy exchanges between the two criminal drifters, peppered with now-forgotten slang and amusing turns of phrase. Vera says things like, “Crooked as you look, I’d hate to see a fellow young as you wind up sniffing that perfume Arizona hands out free to murderers.” When the protagonist asks where the “butts” are, Vera says, “On the table, sucker.” Things like that.

The moment when the road-grimed and clearly unstable Vera lets on that she knows whose car she’s riding in, the whole novel clicks. Unfortunately, that comes pretty late in the game. It’s to Goldsmith’s credit that he wrote the screenplay for the film version, and took the opportunity to bring Vera to the fore and take the red pen to Sue and her sensitive rapist.

Detour the novel, however, remains the larval form of the work. If it has anything to teach us, it’s probably about authorial grit. Had Goldsmith not sat down every day and hacked out his bimbo diaries and ground out the hitchhiker plot until he—probably with a shrug—decided to toss Vera in, he would be as forgotten an artist as Raoul Kildare.

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Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956) is celebrated as the film that announced the arrival of one of cinema’s greatest directors. It’s also a reminder that great films are rarely the product of a single genius (the infamous auteur). While Kubrick’s crisp visual style and innovative storytelling deserve the praise they receive, the movie bears the fingerprints of legendary noir novelist Jim Thompson, whose contribution to the screenplay has been overshadowed.

The Killing, based on Lionel White’s novel Clean Break, follows career criminal Johnny Clay (Sterling Hayden) as he assembles a team for an intricately planned racetrack heist. The premise sounds straightforward, but Kubrick transforms it into a dazzling puzzle. The film constantly shifts perspective and loops back in time, revealing the same events from different angles until every moving piece locks into place. Today, audiences recognize this kind of fractured chronology from filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan, but in 1956 it would have felt fresh. The film’s structure is as exciting and exacting as the heist itself.

Maybe it’s my past as a bit of a racetrack degenerate, but the centerpiece of the film is the racetrack robbery sequence. Kubrick stages the operation with precision, building suspense through a web of seemingly unrelated actions that gradually reveal themselves to be parts of a single elaborate plan. Every distraction, every timed movement, and every secondary character has a purpose. The sequence is thrilling because of flawless cinematic craftsmanship. Watching the plan unfold is like observing a master chess player execute a winning strategy.

Yet The Killing is more than a clever caper flick. It is soaked in the fatalism that defines classic film noir. Every character is driven by greed, desperation, jealousy, or misplaced ambition. The dialogue is lean, the shadows are deep, and the universe itself seems determined to punish anyone who believes they can outsmart fate. Even when the plan appears perfect, doom hangs over every frame. The film’s unforgettable ending perfectly captures noir’s central philosophy: sometimes the universe doesn’t need a villain to ruin your life. Chance is enough.

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That worldview is precisely where Jim Thompson’s influence becomes impossible to ignore. Thompson, already renowned for hardcore novels like The Killer Inside Me and The Getaway, was brought in to help write the screenplay. Although Kubrick ultimately received the primary writing credit alongside Calder Willingham, Thompson’s voice echoes throughout the finished film. The morally compromised characters, the bleak humor, the sense that ordinary people are only one bad decision away from catastrophe… all hallmarks of Thompson’s fiction.

For decades, Thompson’s contribution remained underappreciated. Kubrick’s towering reputation understandably drew attention away from everyone else involved, but revisiting The Killing today makes it easier to appreciate it as a remarkable collaboration. Kubrick supplied the visual precision and structural innovation, while Thompson infused the story with the grim, unsentimental humanity that elevates it beyond a simple heist picture.

The Killing remains one of the greatest noir films, not just because of the Kubrick angle, but because it paired his extraordinary cinematic eye with one of America’s greatest crime writers. Jim Thompson may not have received equal billing in film history, but his shadow looms over every dark, cynical frame.

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