A Paladin & Pulpy Goodness

Larry Correia is trekking out into the timbers of Fennario — in his own backyard — for a new series that looks to cluster in the x-ring of Frontier Partisans pulpy goodness.

American Paladin is my new series that I’m kickstarting with Ark Press. Set in the modern west, it’s the story of a lone vigilante that takes care of problems, both the regular kind and the supernatural. This one, we get to play Cowboys vs. Aztecs.

Yeah, go ahead and take my plews.

It’s Have Gun–Will Travel crossed with Monster Hunter International, but with an existential vigilante character like Reacher or Dirty Harry. Mike Spears is today’s version of spaghetti westerns’ Man With No Name—an authentic, modern, blue-collar, weapons-savvy hero. The series is deeply rooted in Larry Correia’s background growing up in outback California and the legends and regional weirdness of America’s Mountain West, where he now makes his home.

The project is live now on Kickstarter and going great guns (sorry).

I really liked Correia’s Dead Six series, co-written with Mike Kupari. That’s a military thriller series set in an unspecified near-future (as imagined in 2011) where the wheels are well and truly coming off, and PMCs are tasked with either keeping the lid on chaos or tearing it off, depending on whose interests they serve. There are two POV characters written in the first person — one a soldier, the other an ace thief. Pulpy goodness for the 21st century.

Correia’s a gun guy. I first heard of Korth Revolvers in Dead Six. Gratuitous Korth combat revolver photo follows…

I like the dude. He’s a helluva storyteller in the pulp fiction vein, clearly having a blast spinning his yarns — and he’s proved uncancellable in the very strange and hostile world of fantasy/sci-fi publishing. I find it most interesting that he’s going the indie Kickstarter route. He’s got enough of a base that he just doesn’t need traditional publishing. Anyways… I’m in.

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Jack Carr’s Cry Havoc is rolling out in less than a month. The official book trailer just dropped:

And you can listen to the prologue through the Danger Close Podcast:

I got a kick out of the brief vignette of a Vietnam tomahawk. Carr is truly Mr. Tomahawk.

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My current audiobook “read” also ventures out into the timbers of Fennario. I must be feeling the advent of autumn…

In the midst of the First World War, a handful of allied POWs escape the torments of Germany’s most brutal internment camp only to find themselves stranded deep in the merciless wilderness of the Alps.

The locals there are odd, and their traditions ancient. With hushed voices they whisper of a beast that roams the frozen mountains. They call it… The Sarvàn.

This is seriously good. Good as in I didn’t want my Tuesday night work to end because I wanted to keep rolling with it. The protagonist is Edward Blackwood, an American raised in the Montana Rockies (there is a brief allusion to cattle rustling) who went north to Canada to enlist for the Great War — like Herbert McBride or the Ludlow Brothers of Jim Harrison’s Legends of the Fall. As the novel opens, he’s leading an extremely dangerous trench raid.

I have followed Douglass Hoover for a while through Striped Dog Forge. Hoover, a Marine combat veteran who roams the North Woods of Maine, makes handsome custom knives and leather goods.

I knew that he has written some highly regarded horror novels with wilderness settings and always meant to delve in. Well, now I have, and I feel a binge coming on…