Larry Blamire

To start with, I'm a huge fan of Larry Blamire's film, including the two Lost Skeleton masterpieces and Dark and Stormy Night. Part of what makes them so wonderful is their pitch-perfect rendition of the dialogue of the cult-classic films their parody. Blamire truly knows his genre and does an incredible job of sending it up.

I had expected this book to read a pastiche of a similar genre, the pulp novel. In particular, the title and cover clearly pointed at the classic Doc Savage, whose plain-spoken style was ripe for parody.

Instead, what I found was the same stale joke told over and over. Not just in dialogue, but in the body of the narration, we get the repetitious repeating of repetitive statements, in which the statement is first made, and then made again in a manner which repeats, thereby underscoring the inherent repetition when it it is repeated a third time, and so on, ad nauseum, ad infinitum.

This is not the style of pulp fiction. I would expect a very direct narrative style, with occasional overblown descriptive passages, hero worship of the protagonist, and frequent deus ex machina. We find none of that here.

I will continue to watch and love Blamire's films, but they just don't translate directly to prose.… (meer)