An Interview With Alec Cizak, Author, and Editor of Pulp Modern Magazine

 Alec Cizak is the editor of Pulp Modern magazine, as well as the author of several novels, novellas, and numerous short stories. He also founded All Due Respect and his championing of dark, gritty fiction that pays homage to the original pulps of a hundred years ago is unflagging and respected. One Bite at a Time was lucky to grab a little of his time so those who are as yet unaware can learn more bou t him.

 

One Bite at a Time: Welcome to the blog, Alec. You’re best known as a pulp writer and editor. “Pulp” is a term that’s been around for a long time and, like “noir” it has almost come to mean whatever the speaker wants it to. For some, the two terms seem to be interchangeable. What is your definition of pulp, and how does it differ from noir?

 

Alec Cizak:  Thanks for having me! I guess pulp is a term that encompasses all the genres that make “literary” writers grumble about what does and does not constitute “real” literature. While “literary” writers tend to dwell on the boring, mundane minutiae of ‘reality,’ pulp makes the medicine go down with a hint (or sometimes an overdose) of the fantastic. Whether it’s horror, adventure, fantasy, westerns, or even romance, the function of escapism is fully engaged in pulp fiction. We should always remember the original pulps had their prime in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. Just imagine how important escape was when you had to scratch and claw for a piece of bread to trick your belly into thinking you’d had a full meal. Noir differs, I believe, in that it sneaks up on the realism “literary” fiction pretends it has a monopoly on and offers readers an escape that is dangerously close to reality. The sole relief, perhaps, being that the fate of characters in a good noir is much, much worse than whatever momentarily troubles the reader in his/her/their ‘real’ life.

 

OBAAT: You were the originator of All Due Respect, which became a leading platform for your kind of fiction. Starting up such a magazine is a considerable effort. What made you decide to do it?

 

AC: I wanted to create a venue that spotlighted a single writer for a month. I also wanted to create a venue that didn’t handcuff writers with restrictions on subject matter. Crime is dirty. Crime is nasty. Crime is violent. And crime is ugly. I wanted to publish fiction that reflected these aspects of criminality.

 

OBAAT: You eventually moved on from ADR to start Pulp Modern.  What’s the story behind that?

 

AC: Pulp Modern started because no venue gathering all the pulp genres in one place existed. As others have said, if you want to see it and it doesn’t exist, you must create it. So, I did.

 

OBAAT: Most of your books are of the type of story you’ve featured in your magazines, except Lake County Incidents. What’s different about that one and why the departure?

 

AC:  When I started writing short stories back in grade school, they were always horror stories. As I got older, however, I decided I wouldn’t write horror unless I thought for sure I could freak out the reader in some way. I think if a story is advertised as horror, it is obligated to scare the audience. Too much horror I’ve read over the years has failed in this respect. A lot of horror is predicated on gore, on what Stephen King called “the gross out” (in his book Danse Macabre). That’s not interesting to me. I had a flash of inspiration, however, in 2015, and wrote a series of stories I believed would unsettle readers. Most of them were published at various venues. My publisher, ABC Group Documentation, asked to see a collection of them and eventually published it.

 

OBAAT: You’ve written several novels. For someone new to your work, which would you suggest they begin with to get a representative idea of your style and voice that is most accessible. (Full disclosure: I ask this because when I decided to investigate James Ellroy I began with The Cold Six Thousand, which is brilliant but definitely not the place to start.)

 

AC: Depending on who you ask, I’ve only actually written two novels, Breaking Glass and Cool It Down. (A reviewer erroneously called Cool It Down a novella; it’s not. It’s well over 50,000 words. I consider that the low end of novel length.) Those books are a little challenging to newer readers as I experimented with the genre and I’m not convinced they were successful experiments. For straight up noir that is easily accessible, I would suggest the novella Down on the Street.

 

OBAAT: Given the kinds of stories you write and accept as an editor, what are your thoughts on trigger words, or, more generally, on words polite society would not want us to use?

 

AC: If a story calls for language or situations some might find “offensive,” the writer needs to decide what’s most important to communicate to the reader and go from there. Do keep in mind that I have never published anything at Pulp Modern that is “offensive” merely for the sake of being “offensive.”

 

OBAAT: Where can readers find out more about you?

 

AC: The best thing to do is read my short stories. ABC Group Documentation just published a collection called Nobody’s Coming Home.

 

OBAAT: What’s next on your writing agenda?

 

AC: I’ve been working on a novel since 2020. My writing agenda is dominated by my desire to finish that damn book!