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.
