Book review: Pulp by Robin Talley

I loved Robin Talley’s previous books and as soon as I read the synopsis for this I knew it was so far up my street that I was desperate to read it. A novel dealing with the lesbian pulps of the 1950s? Yes please! The genre was a fascinating one and with Robin Talley I knew it would be in safe hands.

The books, with their lurid titles and covers, were marketed as titillation (many, though by no means all, were written by straight men and were pretty bad) but the better ones often meant a great deal to women who discovered them and saw, perhaps for the first time, that they were not alone in their feelings. Unfortunately the “morality” of the time precluded happy endings for the lesbian characters, who almost invariably ended up dying or turning straight - exceptions were few and far between. A lot of the books referred to are real (including, believe it or not, Satan Was a Lesbian).

Anyway, in the present day seventeen-year-old Abby, struggling after her breakup with girlfriend Linh and difficulties between her parents at home, discovers and is quickly captivated by the strange world of 1950s lesbian pulp novels, in particular one called Women of the Twilight Realm by the mysterious Marian Love, who apparently only published one novel and promptly disappeared. Abby becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to Marian... 

Many years earlier in 1955, another young woman, Janet, is equally captivated by A Love So Strange, the novel she stumbled upon at a bus station bookstall, seeing in it a much-needed recognition of her own feelings for her friend Marie. But times are far more dangerous for Janet than for out-and-proud twenty-first-century Abby.

The hysterically repressive political climate of the McCarthyist 1950s is very well evoked and it was fascinating (and terrifying) to read about the measures taken against anyone who was suspected of, well, anything, particularly anything communist-y or gay-y. At one point a female character comes under suspicion because “her voice is too low” - that’s the level of absurdity people were dealing with. Although clearly far too young to remember any of it, Robin Talley has definitely done her research (Senator Hunt was a real person for instance).

There are lots of nods to real writers of that and other times - Bannon Press is clearly a reference to writer Ann, perhaps the best known of the lesbian pulp authors, and I felt Claire Singer’s name was a reference to the pseudonym under which Patricia Highsmith wrote The Price of Salt, Claire Morgan. (Also the Sheldon Lounge - Alice Sheldon?) I’m sure there were many I missed.

I thought I knew where the plot was going in terms of what happened to Janet, but as it turned out, I was barking up an entirely wrong tree and the outcome was a big surprise. Let’s just say I did one character a major disservice.

For me this book entirely lived up to its promise - I loved it.

Pulp can be preordered here.