We don't do a ton of Guest Posts here at the Bat Cave but when author Jill Sorenson reached out to me recently I couldn't say yes fast enough, especially when I learned her proposed subject matter.
Welcome Jill!
According to dictionary.com, pulp fiction refers to books or magazines “dealing with lurid or sensational subjects, often printed on rough, low-quality paper.” Romance readers don’t use the term “pulp,” but other words like “trashy” and “smut” are common. As mass market paperbacks lose ground to other formats, pulp fiction has become a relic of the past.
Pulp romance perfectly describes what I read as a teenager, however.
The love scenes were so explicit, and bewildering, that I had to take the book to school to show my friends. You can read more about it at My First Smut. Better yet, you can submit your own story!
I don’t remember how I ended up with Bandit’s Embrace. YA titles were scarce when I was young, so I read adult books. I was an independent reader with free rein, allowed to scare myself shitless with Stephen King and Dean Koontz.
As a Gen X kid, I also had free roaming privileges. One summer I discovered pulp romance at my local used bookstore. I liked the public library, but I loved the used bookstore. It was the Wild West for book nerds: dusty, disorganized, disreputable. I browsed through a carousel rack of clinch covers. Silhouette Intimate Moments looked promising. At 20 for $1, I got two bags full.
After I read all of those and came back for more, the owner of the shop gave me a side-eye. She asked if my mom knew what I was reading. I said yes, although my mom had no idea where I was, let alone what I was reading. This was the 80s! I rode my bike barefoot without a helmet and bought cigarettes from a vending machine. Naughty books were the least of my parents’ worries.
Bandit’s Embrace might have been one of the treasures I found in that dusty little shop in Nowhere, Kansas, but my love for pulp romance didn’t begin with Bandit, or even with those steamy Silhouettes. It started earlier, with Sweet Valley High and Sweet Dreams.
My middle school library had shelves upon shelves of teen romance, and you’d better believe I ate them up. I read P.S. I Love You, which launched the Sweet Dreams series but is ironically not a romance. I burned through all the books in the catalogue. These stories bridged the gap toward Adult Fiction.
Sweet Dreams…a gateway drug.
Bantam, the company that published Sweet Dreams, also had an adult romance imprint called Loveswept. If I hadn’t read P.S. I Love You, would I have picked up Sandra Brown’s category romances, become her biggest fan, and decided to write books like her? Who knows!
I have mad love for pulp romance, from Sweet Dreams and Zebra Hologram to Silhouette and Harlequin. I love the pulp cover style, which is making a cool comeback. I love the tawdry, dog-eared, back-aisle vibe. Most of all, I love the memories of the used bookstore—the crowded shelves, the smell of paperbacks, the thrill of discovery—where I lost and found myself.
Tell me what you think about pulp romance. Do you prefer a different term? What’s your favorite series or title from back in the day?
Jill's latest book, Cowboy's Last Stand, just dropped on September 3 and it's the first in a new series.
6 comments:
My gateway drug was Nevada Nights by Ruth Ryan Langan, a very 1980s historical western published by Pocket's Tapestry line (A convent raised heroine named Cameron! A gunslinger hero named Colt!). After that I read Jude Deveraux's Velvet series and A Knight in Shining Armor (I swooned at the end - but honestly I was a teenager, what did I know?). But romance was a forbidden, clandestine fast-burning passion - I soon went back to Gothics and books with dead bodies in them. It wasn't until I was in my early 20s that I rediscovered the thrill of romance through Chick Lit (Watermelon by Marian Keyes was a revelation).
It wasn't until after that I discovered category romance. Even when I got over myself and fell head first into romance, I still sneered at Harlequins. Um, until I actually read one. My favorite line in the late 1990s / early 2000s were Harlequin Desires - and then from there I fell in love with SuperRomance and Temptation (and now I mourn the demise of all three of those lines, sigh).
If you had asked me about the term "pulp romance" ten years ago I'm not sure I would have liked the term - but with publishing abandoning the mass market paperback format in droves, frankly I think it fits. In my dotage I find myself reminiscing about the days when you could walk into a drugstore and see rows upon rows of Harlequins, Silhouettes, Loveswepts and historical romance with eye-popping lusty covers. We were queens and didn't even know it.
We were queens! Haha, that's it exactly. It was a rich time for romance. I loved Watermelon by Marian Keyes. I read all of her books. I was a huge fan of Harlequin Temptation, too! I'm sad for the category lines that got discontinued. Where are the category romances for teens these days? I don't think they exist anymore, so that gateway is closed.
The road to romance genre started in MG and YA books for me too. Buffalo Gal by Bill Wallace and Babysitter's Club Mary Ann and Logan probably first peaked my interest towards romance in books around 8-9yrs old. I remember trying to read my mom's Jewels by Steele way to young and then found That Bag full of '80s bodice rippers around age 11 (also too young lol) and fell in love with The Wolf and the Dove and Rose in Winter by Woodiwiss, have never looked back, 30yrs of reading romance genre 😍 I feel like Harlequin lines were less in my vicinity than thick Bodice Rippers growing up but I've definitely read my share, still do!, they just made less of an impression on me than the sweeping historicals.
Has: I don't know why you showed up as Unknown. Oh well. The vagaries of Blogger.
I'm sad overall with the current state of category romance. There's some exceptions (Special Edition comes to mind) but Harlequin leaned a little too hard into royalty and billionaires for my tastes in some of their other lines. Also I'm still mighty bitter over SuperRomance. That one still stings.
Whiskey: A lot of romance reader origin stories seem to feature the "ubiquitous bag of Harlequins" discovered in Mom's (or Grandma's) closet. Sadly, not for me. My introduction was thanks to an older girlfriend (I want to say I was 13?), but the genre really didn't sink it's claws into me until my early 20s.
I think it was a friend of my older sister's who gave me a Barbara Cartland and a Glenna Finley (Signet) which got me started. I'm not sure if I skipped over teen romance entirely or if they didn't exist yet when I was 12. My great-aunt bought me my first Harlequin!
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