Book review - The Green God by L. Ron Hubbard

Book - The Green God
Writer - L. Ron Hubbard
Published By - Galaxy Press

First things first, I got this book from NetGalley, so thank you netgalley and Galaxy Press for this opportunity.
Good and short Pulp stories are like breathes of fresh air, specially in this day and age when we get lots of huge tomes even spanning a series of 5-10 books. And when it comes from someone as good as L. Ron Hubbard from the golden ages it is even more welcome.


L. Ron Hubbard is known as one of the legends of the golden age of pulp and rightly so as we can see from his huge collection of stories covering many genres and sub-genres of fiction. The Green God is one of his early stories but that doesn't take anything back from it in the entertainment sense. The book has two stories the first is the one the book is named after, which is an action/adventure full of daring escape and unending adversaries, in which our protagonist Bil Mahone sets on a quest to retrieve "The Green God" to bring peace to the city. And thus we get a story of heart-stopping pace and action, in which in the span of about 30-50 pages lots of bad stuff happens to our hero but that doesn't slow his pace or desire one bit and we get a real thriller of a story.

The second story "Five Mex for a Million"is a little bit larger in its caliber than the first and a bit more detailed staring Captain Royal F. Sterling who is accused of murder and got only five mex in his pocket while running from the authorities. And we join his journey to escape from the country in which he meets a Russian beauty fights a whole lot of soldiers and in the end gets (yeah you guessed it) a million mex for his five. This story is a lot more detailed and craftily written and more enjoyable from the first in my opinion.

Well when you start reading a pulp adventure story you kind of know what you are getting at, there are some flaws such as minimal character development, some really unrealistic action sequences and not very composed or manufactured villains but at the end of the day this is just pure entertainment for the sake of it, in which if you don't try to read too much into the flaws you get a very enjoyable experience indeed.
I would again like to thank Galaxy Press for publishing these old stories for us to read and opening a whole new dimension for modern enthusiastic readers of pulp.

This gets 3.5 out of 5 stars.