Adventure fiction · Est. the drugstore wire rack

Thom Johns

Pulp with the safety off.

Somewhere between 1968 and 1984, paperback fiction knew exactly what it was for. Lean. Mean. Funny when it had no business being. Sold off a wire rack by the drugstore door for the price of a sandwich, read in two sittings, and handed to whoever wanted it next.

Nobody makes those anymore.

So I do.

The Books

Two series, two flavors of trouble. Both landing soon.

The Mongrels: Reclamation Day — cover
Coming soon

The Mongrels · Book One

Reclamation Day

The bombs fell. The rich went underground. Now they want their planet back.

Five strays and a war-rig hire out to defend a water town from men in spotless white armor carrying eviction notices. Then they find out what the eviction is really covering — and that the town is going to sell them out before the week is done.

Post-apocalyptic action · brutal and funny.

Blood Tribute — cover
Coming soon

A Deke Mercer Thriller · Book One

Blood Tribute

They marked him for a shallow grave.

Philadelphia, 1977. The mob buried the wrong man and didn't check he stayed down. Deke Mercer came back up out of the dirt with nothing left to lose and a very long memory — and the families that put him there are about to learn what tribute really costs.

Hardboiled crime · men's adventure, straight, no chaser.

House Rules

What you're buying, every time, no exceptions.

  1. Short. Nothing padded to look important. You should finish it in a weekend and want the next one.
  2. Something happens in chapter one. Preferably to somebody who deserved it.
  3. No homework. No glossary, no map you have to study, no eleven books of setup. Open it and go.
  4. The heroes bleed. And lose. And say the wrong thing. That's what makes it worth watching them get up.
  5. Funny is allowed. The old paperbacks knew a joke doesn't lower the stakes — it makes you like the people who'll pay them.
  6. An ending, every book. Series, yes. Hostage situations, no.

The Drop Notice

One email when a book comes out. That is the entire arrangement.

No weekly newsletter. No essays about my process. No countdown campaign. A book exists, you hear about it, we both get on with our day.

Unsubscribe any time. Your address goes nowhere else, ever.

The Guy Writing This

Thom Johns writes the kind of adventure fiction that used to live on a wire rack by the drugstore door — post-apocalyptic action, hardboiled crime, and whatever else can be done in under three hundred pages without wasting anybody's evening.

He came to it by way of a shelf of yellowed paperbacks that were never built to last this long — cracked spines, lurid covers, bought for pocket change and read to pieces. Somewhere in there he decided the world could stand a few more of them.

He writes fast, cuts hard, and figures a book you can't finish in a weekend had better have a very good excuse. He's currently at work on the next one.