Jay Omega 02 Zombies of the Gene Pool by Sharyn McCrumb

Author:Sharyn McCrumb [McCrumb, Sharyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crime, Fantasy, Fiction, Horror, Humour, Mystery & Detective, Science Fiction, Zombies
ISBN: 9780345379146
Google: usUOAQAAMAAJ
Amazon: 0345379144
Publisher: Fawcett
Published: 1992-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

GOOD-BYE AND GOOD RIDDANCE, PM!

A Guest Column By Jack L. Bexler

Providence, Rhode Island June 1958

I write to bury Pat Malone, not to praise him. Speaking no ill of the dead smacks of hypocrisy and I'll have none of it, so I will at least do Pat the courtesy of being as forthright as he was, and not pretend that death has improved him. (Though I thought it might.)

I never met Pat Malone face to face, but I have certainly felt his typewritten wrath in various altercations that ran between ALLUVIAL and JACKAL'S MEAT. One such return salvo was sent back to me unopened in mid-June by Ethel Malone from Cupertino, California, enclosed in a letter saying that her husband Pat was dead, and so, ironically enough, it was his chief enemy who was given the task of announcing his death to his friends. (If he had any.) I only regret that, unlike MacDuff, I cannot also bring them his head.

Others will have to eulogize Pat Malone, the man. I knew him as a typeface with one half the "S" missing. It summed him up very well. The half-essed Pat Malone. He came from a dull, but respectable background, and perhaps being something of the alienated intellectual, the perpetual rebel, made him decide to leave the little college town of his birth, and begin his odyssey-to make a fandom of hell, and a hell of fandom.

He found others of his kind through the S-F magazines of the 'Forties, and later drifted onto the Fan Farm in Wall Hollow, Tennessee, where a mimeograph machine salvaged from a redneck's junkyard launched his career as a fan publisher. ALLUVIAL was born, and its regularity and reasonably good quality (he had a lot of other people's talent to draw from, and he used it well) quickly made him a celebrity in the genre. Not that Pat cared much about that. He contended that it didn't pay anything, and that the people singing his praises were "nobodies," so Pat tried to make the leap to pro-dom.

He managed to write one novel, River of Neptune, which sounded to me like a rewrite of some of Jules Vernes' ideas (most notably "The First Men in the Moon"), but I am not a literary critic. I just know what I like, and in my opinion Harlan Ellison has a better chance to be famous than Pat Malone does.

That one "real" book did not make a happy man of Pat Malone. He didn't become famous with his little paperback yarn. He didn't become the darling of the literati. And he still didn't have any friends. The fact that there is only ONE book by Pat Malone further suggests that it was a fluke, rather than an indication of any real literary talent.

He gained much more notoriety from THE LAST FANDANGO, because people are invariably drawn to sleaze, however mendacious it is.

Pat Malone was a failure. He failed at life. He failed at fandom, his retreat from life. And he failed at being a writer, his retreat from fandom.

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