Recently Read: Pleasure Model

Pleasure Model - by Christopher Rowley

Wow.  Haven’t finished a book in awhile where I felt so conflicted afterwards.  Pleasure Model by Christopher Rowley is the first book to be published by Tor in their Heavy Metal Pulp line.  For those unfamiliar, the line is based off of the Heavy Metal graphic magazine that was the influence for a number of animated movies over the past few decades, and remains a popular adult graphic adventure magazine.  The idea is to take story lines similar to what you would find in the magazine, write them up as prose novels in the style of old pulp adventures, and then have an illustrator add illustrations to almost every page.

The result was, if nothing else, a lot of fun.   I’ll start my review literally from the cover.  The book contains a beautiful painted pulp-style cover by Gregory Manchess.  This is what originally sold me on the book.  As I’ve admitted previously this type of cover will get me to buy a book just so I have the art.