The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is a Historical Novel That Sorta Happened

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Sometimes, you just have to go back to your roots. . .

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I'll readily own up to the fact that the exploits of the Shadow and Conan the Barbarian, not to mention the overwrought H.P. Lovecraft horror tales, inspired me to write as much, if not more, as anything I learned in English Lit. Not to discount Dickens or James Joyce, but the lurid, action-packed tales conjured by Walter Gibson and Lester Dent never failed to transport me to a reality that scraped the world in which we live. My father's addiction to Louis L'amour westerns didn't help matters, either.

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The bottom line remains the same-- the pulps, the dime novels, whatever you want to call them-- were the cornerstone that lay the foundation of pop culture as we know it. They predated comic books, they inspired movies of the time, they created the formula by which American detective series would more or less follow to this day and they launched the careers of more than a few writers who went on to become mainstays of popular literature.

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Paul Malmont's debut novel The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is both a homage to the pulps and the men who wrote them, and a lightning-paced, intricate adventure novel in its own right. Set in 1937 New York, when the pulps were at their zenith, it casts the genre's most popular writers as the unlikely alter-egos of their creations. Walter Gibson (aka Maxwell Grant) and Lester Dent (aka Kenneth Robeson) were the creators of the Shadow and Doc Savage, respectively, the most popular characters of the time. The rivalry between the two writers, and their competition to tell the ultimate pulp tale, is the thread that holds the novel together. That quest leads them on divergent paths that lead to the same destination.

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"Let me tell you a story," Walter Gibson tells a young Ron Hubbard at the novel's opening. "You tell me where real ends and pulp begins." Thus begins this wildly entertaining adventure that weaves historical fact and outlandish implausibility into a package that leaves the reader wondering which parts actually happened, and which were pulp conjurings.

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The death of H.P. Lovecraft, then a fringe writer, even for the pulps, serves as the hook for the mystery that draw Gibson and Dent into a web of intrigue that stretches from NewYork's Upper West Side to the the northern steppes of Manchurian China. As one might expect from a novel that is itself a pulp adventure, facts, though they are laced throughout the work, never get in the way of the story. What we're treated to as a result is a cornucopia of real-life characters playing against a conspiracy of super-villains. Orson Welles and Mao Tse Tung are among the cameo players here, though their roles are hardly pivotal. Robert Heinlein and Louis L'amour are integral to the plot, however. The villains, at least the main ones, a Chinese warlord bent on revenge, and an American military man with no motive beyond greed, are drawn in detail convincingly realistic.

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The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is a pulp at heart, though, and Malmont wallows in the possibilities of the genre. There are subplots involving Chinatown's Tong Wars of the early 20th century, chemical weaponry of mass destruction left over from WWI, mutated, lumbering zombies, madman motivations and nightmare visions. There are outrageous escapes, six-shooter gun battles, sword fights, treasure hunts and the obligatory femme fatale-- in this case, a psychic with a pet chicken).

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Where Malmont is at his best, however, is in his ability to breathe genuine life into his characters. They all have a compelling backstory, from Gibson and Dent, to the "villain" Zhang Mei, and Malmont skillfully interweaves those pasts into the context of the plot. While it does make the novel a bit long-ish (371 pages), it puts the reader into a universe that is immersive and irresistable. In fact, this is a novel that reads like a movie looks. Dissolves and intercuts abound in the story in a cinematic prose style that cries out to be made into a film.

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As an action-adventure novel, The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is a thrill ride the likes of which are rarely seen in mainstream publishing. As a homage to the guys who wrote those thrilling tales that influenced all pop culture to come--and did so for a penny a word--it's a testament to the power of a ripping good yarn.