is "booktok slop" just today's pulp fiction?

03 May, 2026

weather: ☁️➡️☀️ may gray has arrived on schedule
critters: the finch gang

i am a high school dropout, i've never been published but i have several rejection letters, i have the attention span of a hummingbird, i've never been an english major, i don't really get poetry, and i struggle with any prose style denser than fitzgerald. my parents read danielle steel and clive cussler like every other old white couple with a combined six years of higher ed.

all that is to say i don't feel i have a right to my pickiness about reading material. i could not have inherited it and i did not come by it through thoughtful study; my opinions on real literature have little credibility because i can't back them up with education or wisdom. i'd call it elitism if my taste were actually elite--i hate cheap steak, but that doesn't mean i like filet mignon.

because i don't want to be the kind of person who dismisses popular art by default, and because i'm genuinely not clever enough for highbrow art, i try to be generous with my fair shakes. nobody likes the fruity art gay who rolls his eyes at the hoi polloi and then tells you "hoi" already means "the" so saying "the hoi polloi" is like saying "ATM machine."

i have enjoyed several titles that i'd first heard about through social media buzz. for example, my dark vanessa, boy parts, the library at mount char, and my year of rest and relaxation. i read a sleazy romance ebook or fanfic from time to time. i like confessions of a shopaholic and where'd you go, bernadette and the vampire lestat and empire of the damned. furthermore, i like a lot of pulp. i've enjoyed georgette heyer and v. c. andrews and fritz leiber and michael moorcock. i'd even recommend them.

the "let people enjoy things" crowd will sometimes defend recent genre fiction ("booktok books" "fantasy slop" "dark romance slop" &c.) by comparing it to pulp. i understand why, and i do think they have plenty of similarities, but i'm not convinced most people saying this have actually read any pulp. they wouldn't be so eager to call up its specter if they had.

i've bought several boxes of pulps in search of anything good by authors i've never heard of. box buys are the only way to carry out this search--most pulps are, without further qualification, fucking bad.¹ but this does mean i'm in a better position than most to suss out whether yesterday's pulps are actually comparable to today's "slop."

how similar are they, really?

commercial context

both pulp and slop are commercial fiction produced by formulas (or by "tropes" as it's done now) in large quantities at high speed for a mass audience. if the phrase "extruded book product" existed in the 60s, i have no doubt it would be used to describe pulp, and anyone would be right to do so.

presentation

pulp novels were written, printed, and bound in the cheapest, least archival way possible. all of them are now yellow from oxidization and the aged glue is barely hanging onto the covers.

the most popular modern slop titles get sprayed edges and special edition covers. the biggest hits get special editions with extra content, so you buy the book twice (or more). i think this has to do with the intersection of consumerist FOMO and speculation/collectors' markets, but idk. it's odd that these are viewed as collectables because the paper feels like...y'know, pulp.

this is not limited to the most popular mass market books--even pulitzer winners are now printed on this shit. and i've found multiple books on the shelves in the past few years with miscut pages or even upside-down signatures. even a bad book deserves better than this carelessness.

content

a few reliable formulas and their casts of archetypal characters will sell better than experimentation and originality. thus, works in the same genre are tightly similar to one another. the individual works of prolific authors can be hard to differentiate. these things are all true of both pulp and slop.

neither tends to be a vehicle for a sophisticated story.² but the genres are broadly the same--there are always romances, there is always horror, there are always mysteries and thrillers, there is always speculative fiction.³ sensational stories printed cheap have been with us since the broadside ballad. of course preferences within these genres change with the times and the markets, but you never pick this stuff up expecting edith wharton.

verbiage

i have a hunch that many pulp novels enjoyed by 14-year-olds in 1976 are beyond what the average 14-year-old could grasp, or would have the patience to grasp, in 2026. twentieth-century pulp assumes you read some of the anglophone canon in school. the sloppiest twenty-first century slop reads like it believes neither you, nor the author, nor their agent would survive the hobbit.

editing

pulps could have some pretty dire editing sometimes. shoestring budgets will do that. in my (limited) experience, crime pulps and erotic pulps had it the worst. but you used to have to hunt for obvious mistakes in most genres. i remember being ten and freaking out and showing everyone i knew when i found a blatant spelling error in a popular fantasy book.

now i can flip open any given volume on the barnes & noble booktok table and in short order find issues with grammar, spelling, punctuation, and typesetting. why?! (capitalism??)

quantity

the number of manuscripts turned into pulp novels during the 1970s alone would be more than i could read in one lifetime. i don't even want to think about those numbers for our decade. but the result for both types is the same: mass market novels move a lot of paper, so there are more mass market novels than lit fic aiming for a booker prize.

public reception

this right here is where i think pulp and slop have significantly diverged, and in a far deeper way than sprayed edges.

only complete eltingville club types defended the drizzt books as worthy of deep literary consideration. lest you think i'm being a snob again, i'm not innocent of this kind of thing. i will dig into the cheapest cashgrabbiest narratives and pull out a fanon of depth and majesty intended by zero people involved in their creation.

but there are those individuals, whom i assume exist as human beings in the real world, who have overidentified themselves with this decade's equivalents of the drizzt books. i expect most of these people to be unparented children let loose online, but it's distressing how many of them appear to be grown adults with jobs.

we share the book side of the internet with a loud handful of these eltingvilleans. they are few, but the web is a force multiplier. they buy the special editions and merch like we're back in the comic book bubble. they are so used to hostility from haters (guys who hate romantasy, girls who hate harem isekai, &c.) that they spend their time online as emotional disaster preppers. they proudly hate the "classics" and won't read anything older than twenty years. if you prefer the classics to their personal drizzt, you're a pretentious toad. it's not that deep, just turn your brain off, this isn't english class. but also their drizzt is real art, and you're too up your ivy league asshole to see it, and anyway it's not for you.

maybe this is more like the sprayed edges than i think. why are sprayed edges? capitalist culture. why are overidentifying fans? capitalist culture?

authors

modern stan culture can be viewed as a larger, more concentrated form of previous decades' smaller, somewhat decentralized fan cultures. but pulp authors and slop authors seem like different species. if i had to live like a modern genre author for longer than a week i'd run into traffic. imagine needing to be extremely online and exposed to fans and stans and anti-fans, all demanding that you explain yourself and spin up new content and avow/disavow in perpetuity, because any length of silence will make the world forget you in seconds.

pulp authors churned books out at superhuman rates, but if lin carter ever had to give a shit what fanboys thought of him, i don't know about it.

to answer the question at the top of this post: yes, though if your goal is to defend mass market genre fiction, you should definitely not compare it to pulp. (sturgeon's law.)