GARBAUGUST 3-D

SO, IT'S OFF TO ANOTHER READATHON/WATCHATHON THIS MONTH:  GARBAUGUST 3-D!!! 

 This will be the third readathon/watchathon I've ever participated in, after OLD SCHOOL APRIL and GIALLO JULY.  GARBAUGUST was created by Criminolly (over on youtuberz)  and this year he's including movie watching as well as book reading!  GarbAugust is basically celebrating trashy reads (and now movies); trashy not in a bad way but in an awesome sauce way!  My fellow Blue Barracudas (CHOMP!  CHOMP!) Kelsi from Slime & Slashers and Alex the Bookubus are also part of GarbAugust too and I'm expecting to have a lot of fun reading and watching terrific trash all month!  Criminolly has themed it week-by-week (which he says is not necessary to follow if you don't want to)

and there is also a GarBingo Board of prompts to knock off (shown below): 

I've cobbled together my own lil GarbAugust TBR of books which I despair of completing but hope to get a majority of them read. 

I've filled it with trashy Men's Adventure magazine (of MAM's) Western and Spy stories (from the phenomenal MEN'S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY) as well as Shark Attack, a horror novel inspired by the horror films of Lucio Fulci (which some unfortunate souls might consider trash),  and reprints of golden age pulp fiction  from the pages of the BLOOD 'N' THUNDER 2024 SPECIAL EDITION!  On Criminolly's recommendation, I've purchased three ABLE TEAM paperbacks which he says he greatly enjoyed.  In the back of my paperback of ABLE TEAM: ROYAL FLUSH we have those great old ads for other paperbacks and there's one for the ABLE TEAM series whose hyperbole goes like this:  "In the fire-raking tradition of the Executioner , Able Team's Carl Lyons, Pol Blancanales and Gadgets Schwartz are the three hotshots who avenge terror with screaming silvered fury.  They are the Death Squad reborn, and their long-awaited adventures are the best thing to happen since the Mack Bolan and the Phoenix Force series.  Collect them all!"  Wow!  'Screaming silvered fury', indeed!!!  How great is THAT?!?!?!  And hey, the Executioner is featured in that MEN'S ADVENTURE QUARTERLY issue right up there (issue #3) so, since the ABLE TEAM apparently has something to do with Mack Bolan's EXECUTIONER series, I'm double-set for GarbAugust!  As Criminolly points out, the plot for ABLE TEAM: ROYAL FLUSH is very VERY similar to Tom Clancy's PATRIOT GAMES; and this ABLE TEAM novel came out several years before Clancy's book.  Hmmmm.  Also, the plot to the very first ABLE TEAM book TOWER OF TERROR sounds an awful lot like the plot of the first DIE HARD movie.  Could ABLE TEAM be more influential than we ever imagined?!?!?!?! 

Next,  I've also had several of the over-the-top TNT paperbacks for over a decade and I've only read the first one so I'm putting number 2 on my list; as well as the second novel in Robert Lory's DRACULA SERIES which I've owned for about TWENTY years and haven't read any but the first novel as well!  It's just about time I read the second novel, eh?  And then, while randomly looking at booktube videos, I came across a youtuberz channel called "The Book Graveyard" and saw him talk about how much fun he was having reading this KUNG FU FEATURING MACE paperback series, so I snagged me the first 3 novels.  Each of them is titled after the Chinese Year of the Rat etc.  I desperately wanted to buy "The Year of the Cock" but I couldn't track down a copy.  Yet!  After that, I picked up a few others:  a weird paperback anthology called GREAT UNTOLD STORIES OF FANTASY AND HORROR which have stories by both H.P. Lovecraft and Winston Churchill (!), a Gold Medal paperback western called GUNSWIFT by T.V. Olsen, a paperback collection (with an AWESOME vintage cover) of August Derleth's horror stories called MR. GEORGE AND OTHER ODD PERSONS -- "MR. GEORGE" was adapted for an episode of BORIS KARLOFF'S THRILLER -- and a sci-fi thriller FADE-OUT vintage paperback with the best cover in the whole universe, jack!  Just LOOK at that cover!  There are, in fact, a whole LOT of incredibly gorgeous vintage covers for these paperbacks.  Last but not least on my TBR is the tome which Criminolly himself put out called CRIMINOLLY PRESENTS GARBOLOGY: THE GARBAUGUST ANTHOLOGY OF AWESOME TRASH edited by Troy Tradup.  Wish me luck getting all this read (and I haven't even thought about what trashy movies I'm gonna watch yet!!!).  Stay tuned for my post at the beginning of September showing how I did!