Chumpy Walnut

A nostalgic fable about a guy only a foot tall - lost, alone and looking for love and friendship in a wacky, wondrous world of hoboes, gangsters, gamblers, gun molls, showgirls, and other colorful characters.

FATE IS MY PIMP picks up the torrid trail of Vic Valentine, Private Eye as he traverses the mean streets of San Francisco and beyond in search of a mobster's missing teenage daughter, encountering various voluptuous vixens, a female surf band, and a stalker leaving him mysterious musical messages, all while infiltrating an Elvis-theme commune for runaways, led by a deviously decadent Deacon Rivers. Follow the further misadventures of this misguided misfit introduced in LOVE STORIES ARE TOO VIOLENT FOR ME as he continues looking for love in all the wrong places, and unfortunately for him - finding it. Plus! ROMANCE TAKES A RAIN CHECK finds Vic back on the East Coast, tracking down a lead on his cop father's killer, visiting his mother in an asylum, and reuniting with his high school sweetheart, Dolly Duncan, now married to a doper dentist. Nothing is what it seems, times and people have changed, and Vic is going to learn the hard way - again - that some bones, and boners, are best left buried.

"Down A Dark Alley" is a torrid tale exploding with raw romance, savage sex, voluptuous violence, mirthful mayhem and delirious decadence as a sorry sap takes a breathless cross-country walk on the wild side with a ferocious femme fatale, desperately trying to escape a chaotic past and facing an uncertain future. This is hard-boiled but heartfelt neo-pulp fiction for fearless dreamers.

The Thrillville Pulp Fiction Collection is a series of "double features" reprinting the best work of underground literary legend Will Viharo in definitive editions. Volume Three: Chumpy Walnut and Selected Short Stories provides a revealing, entertaining look at the author's seminal works while creatively chronicling his artistic evolution, his very first novel being a unique, charming, nostalgic fable suitable for all ages, the remaining assortment of tales wildly ranging in tone and content from bleak to bizarre, from whimsical to wanton, but always stubbornly original. "(Chumpy Walnut) is my favorite tome in the Viharo oeuvre. Anyone can relate, 'cause we've all got a little Chumpy in all of us." -Eddie Muller, Czar of Noir, author of Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir, The Art of Noir, and The Distance

Wally's disturbingly loud voice becomes an asset.

Wally's disturbingly loud voice becomes an asset.

A Mermaid Drowns in the Midnight Lounge is a lushly lurid, exotically exploitative, sensationally sensual pulp-noir potpourri where star-crossed lovers, sea sirens, monster men, gangsters, porno filmmakers, jazz standards, and an Elvis-spawned zombie apocalypse all intermingle across several parallel dimensions in time and space. This story is unlike anything you've ever read.