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when it comes to trash culture, some people like their guilty pleasures
straight, while others prefer a more watered-down cocktail. Various
intellectuals famously indulged their appetite for pulp years before the
appearance of Quentin Tarantino. Detective stories have long been their
favorite genre, although the Marxist critic Raymond Williams reportedly was
addicted to dime store gothics, those now-vanished paperbacks whose covers
always showed a nightgown-clad woman fleeing a sinister mansion during a
thunderstorm.
Recently, literary slumming has become fashionable, as long as (unlike
Williams) you do it in the proper, he-man style and tough it out with
haute-genre writers like James Ellroy ("American Tabloid") and Thomas
Harris ("The Silence of the Lambs"). These high IQ-scribes specialize in strong meat, tales
of spectacularly sadistic violence and explicit sex (often combined),
stylishly delivered with a noirish cool that congratulates itself for
having the stomach for "dark" themes.
But these books are still fat mass-market paperbacks with their
titles stamped out in huge foil letters -- airplane reading. What about the
reader who wants a potion with the same kick but with a fancier label, and credit for knocking off one of the talked-about books of
the season? Fear not, for a handful of Manhattan's literati are on the case.
Next page: The potential for evil lurks within everyone
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