Vintage Pulp | Jun 20 2015 |
Above, a truly excellent Rudolph Belarski cover for Shack Road by Hallam Whitney, aka Harry Whittington, for NYC-based digest publisher Star Novels. What you get here is a hayseed sharecropper named Juba who is surrounded by highly sexual hayseed women, including a soon-to-be runaway daughter, a wife that draws men like flies, and a mother-in-law only fifteen years older than Juba’s wife and who was once the fastest girl around. Juba owned a car once, but sold it twenty-six years ago to pay maternity ward bills. He finds another one by the side of the road and decides to hitch his mule to it, pull it home, and get it running. If he can manage it life will be sweet again, but complications, of course, arise. Simple people and countrified prose, in a book that was part of a popular sub-genre of mid-century hick novels.