I know it’s gauche to start an essay with a definition, but bear with me for a second, I promise it’s relevant.
Pulp fiction is technically defined by how it’s published, in magazines made with inexpensive wood pulp paper, priced cheaply to be sold and read in bulk. Sometimes this “quantity over quality” approach applied to the stories themselves, but sometimes it didn’t; pulp fiction, like all fiction, is only as good or as shoddy as the author writes it.
But beyond the technicalities of publishing, pulp fiction also developed a sort of overarching genre definition based on some recurring themes that tended to crop up in the stories again and again, regardless of categories like fantasy, noir, horror, etc. — namely, big, bombastic heroes squaring off against sinister, mysterious villains in dangerous, exotic locales, featuring beautiful women of both the damsel and the deadly variety.All of this is to underscore that pulp fills a certain niche in fiction, and that The Bone Queen by Andrea Judy (disclaimer: another indie author friend of ours for several years now) falls squarely into this niche, so the answer to the question “But is it good, though?” will vary depending on where a reader stands in relation to said niche.
Do I like it? Yeah, I think it’s pretty good. The narrative isn’t deep or particularly nuanced; it doesn’t ask any tough questions or make many thoughtful moral arguments; and the fact that it’s an origin story for a character named “the Bone Queen” means you kind of know where the book is going to end up, more or less, from the word “go.” But it’s an entertaining trip getting there, straightforward and simple and fun, and full of rotten, visceral imagery, dark magic, and bone-crunching (in the most literal sense possible) action.
The Bone Queen is a fantasy novella prequel to a supernatural noir short story, also titled “The Bone Queen,” found in the new-pulp anthology The Pulptress. That same short story also spawned a novella sequel, The Pulptress vs. The Bone Queen: Blood and Bone, also a supernatural noir story which continues the rivalry where the short story left off. While the original short story and Blood and Bone are both modern adventures starring the aforementioned Pulptress with the Bone Queen as the antagonist, The Bone Queen is set far enough in the past to count as a dark historical fantasy, taking place somewhere in the midst of the Black Death.
The story focuses on Renata, a priestess of the death goddess Mene who falls emphatically on the “deadly” side of the beautiful pulp woman sliding scale, and her quest to find and stop whatever necromancer is at the center of a zombie plague that’s overrun the land — both for the obvious reason of saving lives and restoring order, but also, perhaps more importantly, because necromancy is blasphemous against Mene and her dominion over the dead. She’s aided along the way by her fellow priests of Mene as well as newcomer Aramis, a plague survivor who’s out of his depth but still wants to help set the world right again if at all possible.
Beyond the specific details of what happens during the course of the plot and to whom, that’s about all there is to the story, besides a sort-of semi-twist that comes about midway through the book and takes the whole endeavor down a darker, more visceral path — the kind of thing that might be considered a spoiler if it weren’t in the back blurb and if this weren’t explicitly an origin story for, again, a villain who calls herself the Bone Queen.
Still, this simple, straightforward approach to plot that focuses less on twisting, complex motion and more on action set pieces and comic book-esque, larger than life (and death) characters is what sets pulp fantasy apart from regular fantasy as its own distinct flavor.
And it’s a flavor I tend to enjoy, even though I’m not exactly a big pulp fan myself. The noir pulp trappings of the Pulptress and her myriad starring stories don’t really do it for me, for example, though I should stress here that this is down to personal genre preference and not a fault of the authors in any of the Pulptress-centric stories I’ve read so far, including Andrea’s. When I do read pulp, I prefer stuff along the lines of Conan and Red Sonja or the Bifrost Guardians, or the occasional dip into second-hand serialized paperback anthologies like Warrior Fantastic or the Chicks in Chainmail series.
Which is why the creepy crawly Bone Queen is my favorite part of what I’ve seen of the Pulptress series, and why the character’s standalone adventure is one of my new favorite pulp reads (and my favorite new-pulp read, if we’re getting technical). With the effluvial, action-heavy stylings of a hack-and-slash, sword-and-sorcery zombie apocalypse, The Bone Queen distinguishes itself from most other pulp fantasy tales with a unique flavor all its own — a rancid flavor, sure, full of decay and gristle and dead blood, but a quick and oddly satisfying snack of a story because of it.
