Pulp Friday: dark hungers and primitive passions

My post earlier this week on 50 Shades of Grey and, consciously or not, how it feeds into the rich seam of sleaze and sex pulp popular in the late fifties and sixties, generated a lot of interest.

Today’s Pulp Friday is a selection of titles from this sub-genre of pulp fiction. The following editions hail from the sixties and span pulp from the UK, US and Australia. They cover off all the main pulp obsessions.

There’s illicit young love in The Offenders and The Hot Summer (as the blurb for The Offenders puts it: “Old enough to know better – young enough not to care…”)

Primitive Passions, Dark Hunger, A Feast of Friends and Boarding House all deal with innocent women dealing with the dark sexual appetites of men. As the cover of Dark Hunger put it: “Her mind shrank from the horror that was happening to her – but her body cried for me.”

The sexual desires of wanton women also got a thorough going over in books such as House of Deceit (“She was an amateur in love – but a professional in sin”) and The Dream and the Flesh: “Into the sin pits of Paris she lured him. Into the nameless dark places of reckless thrills.”

Even a serious, award winning French novel gets a pulp make over in The Mesh. “A novel of strange, hidden passions – of women living in a forbidden world.”

Last but not least, Traded Wives looks at one of the favourite obsessions of late sixties pulp fiction, wife swapping. As the back cover declares: “Take these wives – and their husbands – and roll the dice. For wife-swapping is the new vogue these days! This unblushingly frank novel gives you all the spicy details and weird, twisted rules.”

There’s many more of these and other pulp covers on my Pulp Curry Pinterest site.