Slaughter Realms: The Post-Nuke Pulp Spoof That Never Was

 

Slaughter Realms: The Post-Nuke Pulp Spoof That Never Was 

Back in the early days of the blog I came across a website dedicated to “Slaughter Realms,” which was purported to be “a seminal pulp series during the heyday of post-apocalyptic fiction,” one that was “almost forgotten now.” Clearly a spoof of Gold Eagle’s Death Lands (which I so dislike I’ve never reviewed a single volume of it in the 13 years of this blog), Slaughter Realms was a facetious spoof of the pulp-fiction factory…courtesy a former Gold Eagle/Death Lands writer: Alan Philipson, whose work I mainly know from Gold Eagle series SOBs. 

The Slaughter Realms website was centered around a “lost” final manuscript for Slaughter Realms, written by the longest-running author on the series: Daniel Desipio. The schtick was that “newly-discovered” chapters would be published each site update, but only five chapters (plus a Prologue) were ever published. 

It was an interesting attempt on Philipson’s part, both satire and tribue to the genre that he’d worked in for decades. The series setup was incredibly busy, more fantasy than the post-nuke pulp one might expect, featuring “Martian Time King” villains, Runic weapons, an “Iroquois Ninja Princess” protagonist, and taking place in the future. The humorous background “history” for the series has it that Slaughter Realms was the work of “eight anoymous English Lit majors – hyper-caffeinated, half-starved, sans sleep for 36 hours and locked in a windowless, basement conference room,” who wrote the series “in return for five ‘Meat Lovers’ pizzas with double cheese, a six-pack of Olde English forties, and their promised eventual freedom.” 

In fact, I got more enjoyment out of this spoofy metatextual background than the “lost chapters” themselves – I never actually read them, and indeed forgot about the entire Slaughter Realms enterprise. (Fortunately, though, I saved the website to my Chrome favorites.) As I recall, there was also a forum on the site, and I remember going on there and seeing comments from readers, so hopefully some of you out there remember Slaughter Realms and we can get some kind of closure on what happened to it. 

It’s clear though that Alan Philipson shut it down some years ago – my assumption is he wasn’t making any money off it or he just lost interest. The site appears to have last been updated with a new chapter in 2009, and then was taken offline in 2013. The site is gone, but hey – that’s why god invented the Wayback Machine. Luckily I still had the old URL address! 

So, here is the website as it was last captured, where you can read the various background sections and the five completed chapters: 

Slaughter Realms

On a bummer note, you can only read the first page of those five chapters…due to how Philipson created the site, the chapters are pop-ups, and the WayBack Machine is only showing the first page of each. And even worse the “plain text” link for the complete five chapters does not work in any of the site captures the WayBack Machine made of the website. Did anyone out there save the Prologue and five chapters as a text file? If so, please let us know! But it is kind of ironic, isn’t it – a pseudo “lost” novel has now really been lost. 

As I mentioned here before, Alan Philipson’s real name is Mark Mandell. He’s published men’s adventure novels under both names, but the About Alan Philipson page on the old Slaughter Realms site actually provided a very subtle clue that “Alan Philipson” was really Mark Mandell. There we read that Philipson “was waylaid by rock and roll…during his university years,” and “a song of his was released on a compilation CD set Love Is The Song We Sing by Rhino Records.” 

Off to Discogs.com I went to research this release – and there found “Mark Mandell” credited for lead vocals and rhythm guitar (as well as for writing the song) as a member of the group Notes From The Underground, on the 1968 track “Why Did You Put Me On:” 

Pretty cool – who would’ve thought this guy would go on to write violent action novels in the ‘80s??

Anyway, let me know what you all think of Slaughter Realms, and if anyone out there remembers it, or has the published chapters to share…and also if Mr. Alan Philipson is out there and would like to comment, that would be awesome, too! Maybe he could consider finishing the project and putting it out there for all to enjoy – I’m sure there are some modern pulp publishers that would be happy to talk to him about it!