"The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction" is one of those books of short stories I keep on my nightstand and read from for years, a few stories here and there every so often. I normally don't finish these books, they just languish until I get tired of looking at them and move them onto the shelf, but I finished this one (not quite sure what got into me). I'm always so excited to read these books when I buy them, but then I never finish them.
At any rate, it was a pretty decent selection of short stories. Some were duds, but there were a lot of good ones too, and some of my favorite authors, like Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins.
I was disappointed in this book. Cawthorne's definition of "cult" seemed pretty fast and loose, and each cult only got 3-5 pages, so he didn't really get to explain why he was including them. After awhile they all got pretty repetitive anyway: charismatic leader, usually religious, hoodwinks a group of people and brainwashes them into turning over all their worldly possessions, usually through some combination of sex and drugs, and gets them to do stupid things, like commit mass suicide or murder people.
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