The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril
A Novel
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4.4 • 7 Ratings
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is a thrilling debut novel that casts the rivalry between two of pulp fiction's most revered writers into its own saga, which bursts from the pages with blood, cruelty, fear, mystery, vengeance, courageous heroes, evil villains, dames in distress, secret identities, disguises, global schemes, hideous deaths, beautiful psychics, superweapons, cliff-hanging escapes, and other outrageous pulp lies that are all completely true.
Return to 1937, when America is turning to the pulps for relief from the Depression, and meet Walter Gibson, the mind behind The Shadow, and his rival for the top-selling spot on the nation's newsstands, Lester Dent, creator of Doc Savage. The murder of Gibson's friend H. P. Lovecraft -- victim of a mysterious death that literally makes the skin crawl -- is about to bring these two writers face to face with a peril sprung from the pulps.
The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is at once a valentine to an old-fashioned genre as well as a modern, meta-literary examination of the classic hero pulp. From the palaces and battlefields of warlord-plagued China to the seedy waterfronts of Providence, Rhode Island; from frozen seas and cursed islands to the dizzying and labyrinthine alleys and tunnels of lower Manhattan, Dent and Gibson, joined by the young pulp writer L. Ron Hubbard and a host of colorful characters, finally step out from behind the shadows of their creations to take part in a heroic journey far greater than any story they have imagined as they race to stop a madman destined to create a new empire born of, and based in, pure, gaseous evil.
The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is a swashbuckling romantic tale of writers and writing, magic and love, marriage and fatherhood, and ambition and loss that weaves the true lives of its real-life characters into a fictional epic.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Malmont's debut thriller reads like pages torn from the pulp magazines to which it pays nostalgic homage. It's 1937, and the nation's two top pulp writers William Gibson, author of novels featuring caped crime fighter "The Shadow," and Lester Dent, the creator of do-gooder hero Doc Savage are trying to solve real-life mysteries that each hopes will give him bragging rights as the world's best yarn spinner. Gibson follows rumors that pulp colleague H.P. Lovecraft was murdered to the fog-shrouded Providence, R.I., waterfront. Dent tracks clues to an impossible killing through the bowels of New York's Chinatown. As the two adventures dovetail, they spawn sinuous subplots involving tong wars, secret chemical warfare, pirate mercenaries, kidnappings, revolution in China and weird science run amok. Lovecraft, L. Ron Hubbard, Louis L'Amour and Chester Himes all play prominent supporting roles and offer piquant observations on the penny-a-word writing life that conjure a colorful sense of time and place. Like the pulpsters he reveres, Malmont doesn't let the facts get in the way of his storytelling, and the result is a fun, if wildly improbable, pulp joyride. 100,000 first printing; author tour.
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