“But when several members of the PAC Squad find themselves captives of a crazed zealot, an ancient and unstoppable monstrosity, a true Halloween terror, is unleashed upon the parched earth… and even telekinesis and high-explosive rounds might not be able to stop it.”
– Wrath of the Pumpkin God description
As readers already know, I like to write short Kindle books as a source of passive income. A while ago I decided to create a pulpy science fiction series that’s kind of like Eagleheart in outer space. It’s violent, nonsensical, fun that I have a lot of fun writing.
While all of the story ideas are from my own mind, I like reading other pulp novels for inspiration. I have a huge collection of old Destroyer and Able Team books to flip through, as well as a bunch of random old science fiction books. While I already have a lot of material to look through, I recently decided to check out a paranormal fiction series that English Teacher X wrote back in the 1980’s.
Wrath of the Pumpkin God is the seventh book in the The Paranormal Activities Control Squad series. The whole series is built around a meta-joke where there are missing titles and continuity doesn’t matter a whole lot, so you can pretty much start from wherever.
Although I won’t call the book great literature, I did think that it was a lot of fun. The story was goofy and had the campy charm of a American Dad episode. It’s written in an intentionally bad style that utilizes Deus ex machina, silly martial arts, indestructible protagonists, and a preachy “moral” at the end. I thought it was hilarious.
One of my favorite things about Wrath of the Pumpkin God was the book’s fight scenes. They make use of all kinds of silly martial arts terms and do a great job mocking pulpy Kung Fu fights. This is an actual battle that occurs towards the end of the book:
“He drove a bloodlusting shark punch into the Jamaican’s chest, shattering his sternum and several ribs. Fleb Durgett screamed and fell to his knees, vomiting up arterial blood from his shattered pulmonary system.”
Like I said, if you want to read an ultra-violent pulp story, this one delivers in spades. Additionally, Wrath of the Pumpkin God is a great example of what self published Kindle fiction looks like. While everyone clamors over making the next big How-To book, there’s a whole world of short stories and silly novels that is vastly undervalued.