Paul Malmont's debut novel, The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril (S&S), is ostensibly about the authors who wrote the lurid, sensationalistic pulps of the 1930s, but what makes it so compelling is the way in which it's written. Malmont celebrates pulps by writing pulp, and he spends the whole book deconstructing some of its tropes—and then deftly reassembling them in the final chapters. Malmont plays fair with his real authors, inserting them into his narrative flaws and all, and does not feel the need to add to their already colorful lives. The cameos in this book are a delight for fiction aficionados and pop culture geeks, and may well send the less-informed scurrying to Google to get in on the joke. Whether you read The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril as historical fiction or speculative fact, you'll find yourself getting pulled deeper and deeper into the conspiracies, intrigues and author politics of some of pulp fiction's most notorious writers. A startling read; certainly the best book of its kind in many years.